“I love playing cads. They’re more interesting and so many of them seem to have a special kind of power and aura about them."

Dead Funny, with Pippa Hinchley, Chris Larner, and Richard Moore

Adrian Lukis ought to know. With his dark good looks and easy charm, he has often been cast in the role of attractive rogue or upper-class bounder. “He has charm in spades,” wrote Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph in a 2000 review of Lukis’s performance of Beach Wedding at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton. But the actor also relishes darker roles. “I don't often play the good guys or conventional types,” he has said, “but I like playing men who are slightly damaged or have an edge." He can also do both at the same time, as he has proven in several roles. When Lukis portrayed the figure of Death in Lolly Susi’s play Gone to L.A. in 2000, Variety’s Matt Wolf noted that he found “the chill beneath the charm.” In Terry Johnson’s play Dead Funny, he gave “another winning performance, filling his [character] with public bonhomie and private torment,” wrote Fiona Mountford in the London Evening Standard.

Lukis’s big break occurred that same year, when he was cast as the lead in a TV miniseries called After the War, a coming of age story set in the 1950s and 60s. “I've been working my way up in repertory theatre," he told an American interviewer when the show was broadcast on PBS. "It's difficult to get a big TV role unless you're a name. Directors scout around for the biggest names they can get. Granada [the company that produced the series] took a risk in promoting me to the big leagues."

	Cloaca, with Neil Pearson (standing), Hugh Bonneville, and Stephen Tompkinson

Once established as a “name,” Lukis worked fairly regularly in television and theater, although he also had periods of unemployment that forced him to work in a pub. While he prefers being onstage — it “pays terribly badly, but I’m much happier there” — he realizes that television pays the bills. A two and a half year stint in the hit TV series Peak Practice beginning in 1996 rescued him from debt and won him nationwide recognition. (When his character in the series began an extramarital affair, Lukis had people walking up to him on the street to rebuke him.) He still gets cast as charmers, but recent work has offered him a wider range. His 2001 performance in Valentine Guinness’s play Helping Harry won plaudits from the London critics. “Adrian Lukis stands out as a sardonic sculptor, busily laughing, goading, sulking and dreaming,” said the Evening Standard. The Telegraph agreed. “Adrian Lukis brings a lovely quality of aggrieved innocence to the character of Patrick, whose memories of a golden sexual encounter as a student bring a big smile to both his face and ours.” And the Express wrote, “Adrian Lukis—as a failed sculptor with some deliriously happy sexual memories—turn[s] in a performance of real class.”

In 2004, Lukis was one of the four leads in Cloaca, the play with which Kevin Spacey chose to inaugurate his directorship of the Old Vic. The following summer, when Spacey had to leave the theater's production of The Philadelphia Story for a time to film a movie, he chose Lukis to replace him as C.K. Dexter Haven (the role played in the movie by Cary Grant). It was one of those lucky coincidences—Lukis had, several years earlier, inquired about getting the rights to the play, which were unavailable. “I think they were trying to get some American star in,” he said in an interview, “but that’s the way this business works! It would have been very vain of me to be upset by that. But I’d seen the production and really enjoyed it. I like the play, obviously, and it’s really, really lovely to meet up with Jennifer [Ehle, who starred opposite him] again after all these years. She’s a really good person and very straightforward.”

The Lukis household now numbers another professional actor. When Adrian auditioned for a role on the children’s TV series My Dad’s the Prime Minister, he happened to mention his daughter, then fourteen. The producers asked to see her, so Lukis brought her in to his next audition. He didn’t get the part — but Anna did. She now has her own agent.