David Budd

David Budd is a war veteran turned Metropolitan Police Protection Officer, assigned to guard a Home Secretary whose politics he privately despises. He's disciplined, watchful, and visibly strained beneath the surface—a father dealing with separation from his wife and children, carrying trauma from Afghanistan that he keeps locked down tight behind procedure and duty.

Madden plays him as a man holding himself together through sheer will, all clipped composure and controlled breathing, so that every flicker of doubt or attraction reads as dangerous. The show trades on the tension between his professional loyalty and his politics, and Madden makes that conflict physical—you watch him decide, moment to moment, whether to be a good soldier or a good man.