Jason Watkins is one of the most in-demand supporting actors at work today, and so he is relishing his returning role in for one very pertinent reason: he is the lead. Or so it would seem.

“Well, let’s be correct about this,” he says. “I’m co-starring. It’s me and Robson Green.”

He’s right, of course. – a cagey, psychological and only slightly soapy channel 5 drama – revolves very much around Watkins Green. The former plays Huw Miller, a recently retired detective desperate for a quiet life that, by the end of the first episode of series two, will be forever denied him, while Green’s Patrick Harbottle is an imprisoned serial killer who still manages to exert psychological control over people from within the confines of his prison cell (think Hannibal Lecter without the fava beans).

Watkins, speaking on video call, tells me he did not take the opportunity to throw himself into such a meaty role lightly. “When you’re playing a supporting character – which I have done a lot of; number five on the call sheet, that kind of thing – then you are not necessarily taking on the burden of the whole production. This means you can have fun with it, enjoy yourself. But when you’re in the middle of it, as I am here, with Robson, then you have time to flesh out your character, and to make the most of the opportunities you’ve been given.”

To illustrate his point further, he says: “Imagine somebody asks you to paint a portrait of Muhammad Ali, while someone else only wants you to paint the gloves. Which would you rather? You’d want to paint the whole thing, right? Because there’s a big difference.”

And so being number one on the cast list is better than being number five? He considers this for a moment but the eventual smile is big, the wattage dazzling. “Oh, absolutely.”

Though he doesn’t at all look it, Jason Watkins is soon to turn 64. “I do look younger,” he says, nodding. “There’s no point being false about that.” He touches his forehead, and the wide expanse he finds there. “I’ve been bald like this for many years now – I got that out of the way really early on – but otherwise I’ve sort of stayed pretty consistent. I could get away with playing early fifties, couldn’t I?”

Born in Shropshire and raised in Wolverhampton, he was obsessed with sports as a child and made for a pretty skilful footballer, but ultimately felt himself gravitating increasingly towards the arts. By 22, he had graduated from Rada.

“Growing up, I loved dramas like , , and actors like Bob Hoskins and John Hurt,” he says. “I felt that I wanted to do that kind of work, character-led. I’m not sure I ever really wanted to be a star – I just wanted to do interesting work.”

He went on to do just that. Starting in the late 80s with turns on programmes like , he has since clocked up over 140 film and television appearances, and has also acted widely on stage, most recently in a 2025 revival of Chekhov’s , alongside Cate Blanchett.

But it was for his roles in television comedy that he became increasingly known and beloved. Between 2011 and 2018, he starred in , a lovely and very funny supermarket-set sitcom on Sky, and in 2014 he joined the cast of the brilliant BBC self-spoof , as a lanyard-toting executive.

He’s done plenty of drama, too, appearing as Harold Wilson in , and to Bafta-winning effect in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, a true crime series about a man accused of a crime he didn’t commit. “Somebody came up to me recently – a university lecturer in television studies – and said that my performance as Jefferies was one of the best they’d ever seen on TV. So that was nice,” he says.

His success is down not just to his talent but the fact that – like Toby Jones, the actor to whom he is most often compared (and confused with) – he possesses pleasing everyman features that mean he could be pretty much anyone, in pretty much anything. Fundamentally, though, it’s the likeability he radiates that makes, say, 5 more likely to cast him as an anxious detective than a sinister killer.

In , he plays his policeman as eminently fallible and thoroughly humane. Where your average TV detective tends towards the bullish, the self-satisfied, and is often a raging alcoholic, Watkins’ is nervy, uncertain and prone to making errors of judgement. At home, he readily defers to his wife and daughter and when faced with Green’s psycho killer during a prison visit, he visibly quakes.

“Well, I was trying to access his true emotions,” he tells me. “When you’re approaching a role like this, you do wonder how you yourself would act in a similar situation. I couldn’t just go, ‘Well, he’s a policeman; he’s going to be cool about it’, because I don’t think he would be. He’s just a human being.”

A mere three months before Watkins landed his pivotal role in , his two-year-old daughter Maud died suddenly from sepsis. Both he and his wife Clara have spoken publicly about the illness in the hope of raising awareness and preventing other families from going through similar trauma. In 2023 they made a documentary, Jason & Clara: In Memory of Maudie, for ITV. I ask whether he had to think hard about appearing on television with such an emotive subject, as himself?

“Well, that’s an interesting point,” he says. “Someone did come up to me afterwards saying they didn’t know whether they could believe me as a detective now, having made such an honest show about losing a child. But many other people have come up to thank me, so…”

Harrowing as the documentary was, it nevertheless made Watkins even more relatable, someone who could both tell his own story and disappear into somebody else’s. “I don’t think, when I was younger, I really knew what fame meant, or if I wanted it very much,” he muses. “But if I were to complain, now, about the kind of recognition I do have, then I’d have to have a screw loose.”

Today, Watkins, who lives with Clara and their two other children in north London, continues to work prolifically – he’ll soon be seen in The Joy of Sex alongside Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, about the publication of a scandalous sex manual in 1972. But Watkins wants to branch out from acting. “I want to be creative all the time,” he says. To this end, he’s currently working on a novel. There are other pursuits, too.

“I worked with the actor David Thewlis recently,” he says. “We’re the same age, and have many of the same interests. David’s written a novel, and he also paints and does photography, both of which I love, too. I find him very inspiring, and so my ambition now is to do similar. I want to keep working as an actor, obviously, because I love it – high-paying, brilliant jobs, ideally – but I also want to travel in different worlds for a bit.”

‘The Game’ series two starts tomorrow at 9pm on 5