Reverend Osborne Whitworth

Osborne Whitworth arrives in the Poldark parish as a vicar more concerned with comfort than conscience, plump and preening, hungry for a rich living and a well-bred wife. He courts Morwenna Chynoweth with oily confidence, treating marriage as another entitlement due a man of his position, and expects deference from everyone beneath him.

Christian Brassington plays him with a wonderful lack of self-awareness, all appetite and self-regard, so that his pomposity becomes darkly comic before it curdles into something crueler. The writing never lets him become a cartoon; he believes entirely in his own righteousness, which is precisely what makes him so uncomfortable to watch.