Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland is the acclaimed portrait painter commissioned to mark Churchill's eightieth birthday with a fitting tribute. He arrives at Chartwell quiet, watchful, and entirely unimpressed by ceremony, more interested in the truth of his subject's face than in flattering the great man's legend. He wants only to paint what he actually sees.

Stephen Dillane plays him with a stillness that becomes its own kind of defiance — he barely raises his voice, yet every scene turns into a quiet contest of wills with Churchill. The writing uses him to ask what portraiture, and by extension history itself, owes to vanity versus honesty, and Dillane never tips his hand about which side he's on.