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).

But he left behind the rookie officer – frequently the victim of pranks by his colleagues – to become one of the small screen’s most prolific baddies. “I have a gravelly voice and my accent can come across quite aggressively if required,” he told Radio Times.

He made his most lasting impression in the writer Jed Mercurio’s hit police drama Line of Duty, despite acting in only three episodes over the first two series (2012-14). As Tommy Hunter, the cruel boss of an organised crime group, his shadow looms over many of those investigated by AC-12, the police anti-corruption unit. He is behind the killing of a bent copper’s girlfriend – and dog – as well as controlling other corrupt officers, drug-dealing and money-laundering.

When Mercurio asked how he thought the character should look, McCardie replied: “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.”

Despite his own murder at the start of the second series, Tommy haunted subsequent storylines. 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 check, 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), he teamed up with Mark Strong in Channel 4’s feature-length drama Low Winter Sun to play 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).

Later, the 2013 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth featured McCardie as the Edinburgh detective Dougie Gillman – quick to violence – alongside James McAvoy’s corrupt cop. Of his own role, McCardie told the director before filming that he would “make Begbie [from Trainspotting] look like a Disney character”.

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