Brian McCardie, Glaswegian actor best known as the menacing Tommy in Line of Duty – obituary
Brian McCardie, the Glaswegian actor who has died aged 59, first came to the attention of television viewers in a role on the right side of the law, the baby-faced, cheekily named PC Ronnie Barker in Phil Redmond’s Liverpool-set police series Waterfront Beat (1990-91).
There was little to suggest that he would later make his name as one of the small screen’s nastiest villains – Tommy Hunter, boss of an “OCG” or organised crime group in Jed Mercurio’s hit police drama Line of Duty – but as McCardie told the Radio Times: “I have a gravelly voice and my accent can come across quite aggressively if required.”
When Mercurio first asked how he thought the character should look, McCardie said: “Like Eddie Large from Little & Large, with the Pringle V-neck, curly hair, a little bit fat. There’s one of these guys in every major town.”
Tommy appears in only three episodes over the first two Line of Duty series (2012-14), but the character’s shadow looms large over subsequent probes by AC-12, the police anti-corruption unit. He is behind the killing of a bent copper’s girlfriend as well as controlling other officers and drug-dealing, and is later revealed to have been part of an abuse scandal.
When in 2021 Line of Duty fans saw him as the drug-dealing prison overlord Jackson Jones in Jimmy McGovern’s hard-hitting drama Time, alongside Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, some took to social media with comments such as: “Is that the ghost of Tommy Hunter? They don’t want to mess with him.”
“Once you’ve played a couple of psychopaths, the offers keep coming in,” said the actor. With tongue firmly in cheek, he dressed up in a big blue bird suit for Irn-Bru 32 energy drink commercials in 2006, playing a thug cuckoo called Derek, and growling to a prim librarian: “I’ll shoosh you, ya tweedy auld craw.”
Brian James McCardie was born in Glasgow on January 22 1965 to Moira, née Campbell, a nurse, and Edward McCardie, a toolmaker. He grew up in Carluke, Lanarkshire, attended Our Lady’s High School, Motherwell, and was a voracious reader with an interest in politics and history.
Having acted in school productions and played Jesus in Godspell with a local drama group, he trained at Rose Bruford College of Speech & Drama.
McCardie’s early career was given a boost when he was cast in the 1995 film swashbuckler Rob Roy as Alasdair, younger brother of Liam Neeson’s Scottish clan chief. This led to what should have been the actor’s dream – four years in Hollywood. He appeared alongside Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), Tom Cruise in Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997) and Courtney Love and Ben and Casey Affleck in 200 Cigarettes (1999).
But he hotfooted it back to Britain. “I found it quite sordid and Machiavellian, and I was getting put under pressure to sculpt myself into some type of person who was nothing like me,” said McCardie. He described Speed 2 as both “crap” and “stinking”.
With his return came the transition to screen villain. After guest-starring in Murphy’s Law as an Ulster Loyalist paramilitary (2006), in Channel 4’s Low Winter Sun the same year he and Mark Strong played Edinburgh detectives murdering a colleague by drowning him in a lobster tank.
Less severe, but still with an air of menace, was his portrayal of the tyrannical widowed father, an Ulster Protestant, bringing up three Catholic daughters in 1920s Liverpool in Lilies (2007).
In 2013 the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth featured McCardie as the Edinburgh detective Dougie Gillman alongside James McAvoy’s corrupt cop. McCardie told the director before filming that his performance would “make Begbie [from Trainspotting] look like a Disney character”. He played another sleazy cop in Welsh’s series Crime (2022).
His other screen roles included football hardman Dave Mackay in the 2009 film The Damned United and First Officer Murdoch in the TV mini-series Titanic (2012). He also toured his own one-man show Connolly, about the Irish Republican James Connolly, from 2016. (His parents both had Irish ancestors.) Last year, he was seen as a creepy sex offender in the second series of The Tower.
McCardie is survived by his parents and his two brothers and two sisters.
Brian McCardie, born January 22 1965, died April 28 2024
