7) Jeremy Irvine – The Railway Man
Jonathan Teplitzky’s post-WWII saga The Railway Man came and went with nary much audience interest in 2014, almost as though the whole recent Colin Firth fad had died. In the film, Firth stars as Eric Lomax, a former soldier who survived the brutality of life in a Japanese POW camp; the younger Eric is played by Jeremy Irvine.
Anyone who’s seen the execrable War Horse or dreary teen drama Now Is Good will probably about now find themselves groaning in a kind of existential agony; if Colin Firth wasn’t boring enough, you might be thinking, they just had to go and hire Jeremy Irvine to play Firth’s younger self. Only, Irvine is surprisingly great in The Railway Man.
Not just great, but uncannily reminiscent of Firth as well, Irvine helping you forget the fact the two actors look nothing like each other by mimicking Firth’s mannerisms and speech patterns to a T. The young Eric is just a flashback from the main story, but he ends up becoming the most compelling part of the movie in Irvine’s hands, as the usually unremarkable actor underplays the resolute and rational Brit to the point of tragedy.