Dominic Mafham (born 11 March 1968) is an English stage, film and television actor. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Career
Dominic Mafham trained at the National Youth Theatre and then the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Mafham began his career at The Royal Shakespeare Company in 1990. He was with the RSC for four years.
Mafham first came to prominence when he played Nigel Hawthorne's emotionally damaged son Daniel Pascoe in Paula Milne's The Fragile Heart. The drama was screened on Channel 4 in the UK in 1996. It won the 1997 BAFTA award for Nigel Hawthorne as Best Actor, and was nominated for several awards including Best Drama Serial. It was also nominated in the Royal Television Society awards that year.
Mafham played the central character—a high-tech assassin in the Swiss Alps stricken with a conscience—in Duncan Jones's first film Whistle. The film gathered a cult following after showing at various international film festivals, and finally gained a larger audience when it was included on the DVD of Jones's first full-length feature Moon.
Mafham played Mortimer Lightwood in the BBC's 1998 adaptation of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Much of the story is seen from Mortimer's perspective. Our Mutual Friend was acclaimed worldwide, and won four BAFTAs including Best Serial. It was nominated for four more BAFTAs, as well as awards from the Royal Television Society, the Broadcasting Press Guild and the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 1999 he played Grahame Tranter in the Midsomer Murders episode "Death of a Stranger”.
Since then, Mafham has appeared in more than 60 productions, including the films The English Patient and Shooting Fish, and the ITV medical drama Always and Everyone (A&E). He played the killer in the first episode of Foyle's War, Stephen Fry's errant brother Simon Kingdom in Kingdom, and Dr Richard Channing in the BBC World War Two drama Land Girls. He also appeared in two episodes of Lewis and starred in The Clinic. He appeared in Midsomer Murders “Not in My Backyard” as James Otley in 2011.
His more recent television appearances includes the opening episode of the second series of the BBC drama The Musketeers, playing General De Foix; an episode of the BBC series New Tricks, playing a Tory minister suspected of murder; and Humans on Channel 4 and AMC, as recurring character Chief Superintendent Shaw.
His more recent feature films include playing Dr Wangel in Heart of Lightness, a film directed by Jan Vardøen set in Arctic Norway based on Henrik Ibsen's play The Lady From The Sea. He played Sir Horsa in Dragonheart, Druid's Curse, the third in Universal Studios' Dragonheart series, directed by Colin Teague; and Guy 'Bullet Face' Bidwell in Sniper: Legacy, a Sony Pictures film with Tom Berenger and Dennis Haysbert, directed by Don Michael Paul. Mafham returned as Bidwell in the next instalment of the Sniper film series released in 2016.
In February 2016 he appeared in the BBC TV series Father Brown as Sir Malcolm Braithwaite in episode 4.6, "The Rod of Asclepius".
Mafham appeared as Jerry Waldegrave, a guest lead, in the new HBO/BBC television series Strike based on J. K. Rowling's detective novels.
He played Polonius in Claire McCarthy's film Ophelia. The film stars Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, Clive Owen, George MacKay and Tom Felton.
Mafham appeared in season three of Killing Eve playing Charles Kruger, the accountant to The Twelve.
It was announced on 17 November 2021 that Mafham is filming Golda starring Helen Mirren. Academy Award winner Guy Nattiv directs. Mafham plays Haim Bar-Lev, the general responsible for the southern front in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
