Vote for your favourite dramatic performance in the TV Times Awards 2022

Dramatic performance TV Times Awards 2022

(Image credit: Future)

It's been another terrific year of television and what better way to celebrate all your favourite TV than with the launch of our annual TV Times Awards?!

The entries in the Favourite Dramatic Performance category are all heavyweights. Such top-class performances from the past year that it's going to be hard to choose. But choose you must. So, to help you, here's our overview of the 2022 TV Times Awards Favourite Dramatic Performance category.

Favourite Dramatic Performance — TV Times Awards 2022

Jenny Agutter — Call the Midwife
Brenda Blethyn — Vera
Jamie Dornan — The Tourist
Paapa Essiedu — The Capture
Holliday Grainger — The Capture
Ralf Little — Death in Paradise
Lesley Manville — Sherwood
Vicky McClure — Trigger Point
Cillian Murphy — Peaky Blinders
Ben Whishaw — This Is Going to Hurt

TV Times Awards 2022 — how to vote

Voting for the TV Times Awards 2022 has now closed. Thank you to everyone who took part and we will be announcing the winners in TV Times magazine very soon.

Jenny Agutter — Call the Midwife

Jenny Agutter in Call the Midwife — (Image credit: BBC and Nealstreet Productions)

Jenny Agutter has been a mainstay of the Call the Midwife cast. As Sister Julienne, Sister-in-Charge of Nonnatus House, she represents stability, kindness and tolerance. As Sister Julienne, Jenny Agutter has appeared in every season of the long-running drama, tackling a wide variety of storylines — like the consummate professional she is — including Sister Bernadette leaving the order, the reappearance of her old fiancé, Charles and, in the last season, getting seriously injured in a train crash. What would Call the Midwife do without her?

Brenda Blethyn — Vera

Brenda Blethyn as Vera — (Image credit: ITV)

The Oscar-nominated Brenda Blethyn was an acclaimed theatre performer before moving into TV and film — her breakthrough big-screen role came in Mike Leigh's moving drama Secrets and Lies (1996) and since then she's had a rich and varied career. In 2011, Blethyn took on the role of grumpy yet kind Detective Vera Stanhope in ITV's adaptation of Ann Cleeves' crime novels. Over the years she's crafted Vera into a complex but much-loved character that has become an essential part of the TV landscape.

Jamie Dornan — The Tourist

Jamie Dornan in The Tourist — (Image credit: Two Brothers Pictures)

In The Tourist Jamie Dornan plays a character simply known as "the Man" who wakes up in a hospital with amnesia after a car accident in the Australian outback. So begins the successful thriller, which sees Dornan on the hunt for clues to his identity in the face of great danger from people who are hunting him down to silence him forever. Dornan, a skilled actor, who's made a career out of playing inscrutable characters (The Fall, the Fifty Shades trilogy), gives a masterclass performance here, balancing the elements of fear and farce in the situation he finds himself in.

Paapa Essiedu — The Capture

Paapa Essiedu as Isaac Turner in a suit and tie opposite a reflection of himself in The Capture season 2 — (Image credit: Heyday films)

Despite reportedly not watching the popular digital surveillance drama The Capture before he joined its second season, Paapa Essiedu has swiftly made an impression in a cast that's packed full of quality actors. As ambitious UK minister, Isaac "Zak" Turner gives a clever, charismatic performance that ranges from arrogant to vulnerable all within one short season.

Holliday Grainger — The Capture

Holliday Grainger wearing a dark jacket and standing in front of desks as Rachel Carey in The Capture — (Image credit: Heyday Films)

Holliday Grainger gets the second nomination for The Capture for her portrayal of DI/DCI Rachel Carey. Carey has been co-opted into the shadowy organization, The Correction, which wages war on individuals through the use of cutting-edge technology and disinformation but she's still unconvinced whether the means justify the ends. Grainger does a remarkable job of playing the efficient but rather unlikeable DI. All the more remarkable when we think of how different she is in one of her other BBC roles — as warm, kind, vulnerable Robin Ellacott in Strike, the adaptation of JK Rowling's private investigator crime series.

Ralf Little — Death in Paradise

Ralf Little stars as DI Neville Parker in Death in Paradise — (Image credit: BBC)

Taking on the lead role in the long-running and much-loved Caribbean-set crime drama might be a daunting prospect for some actors, but Ralf Little's DI Neville Parker makes the grade. As socially awkward and eccentric as all the DIs on Saint Marie seem to be, Little balances Neville's physical comedy schtick with slower more thoughtful beats. It's a carefully nuanced portrayal that makes him a firm contender in our dramatic performance category.

Lesley Manville — Sherwood

Lesley Manville as Julie Jackson in Sherwood — (Image credit: BBC/House Productions/Matt Squire)

Like Brenda Blethyn, Lesley Manville is an acclaimed actress known for her collaborations with the film director Mike Leigh and nominated for her work on stage as well as on screen. Fortunately for us, Manville also enjoys working on the small screen in roles as wide-ranging as Cathy in Mum, Lydia in Harlots and the upcoming Princess Margaret in Netflix's The Crown. In the gritty drama, Sherwood Manville shows her acting range, as the wife of an ex-miner, worn down by life, poverty and disappointment but still with humor and warmth to spare.

Vicky McClure — Trigger Point

Vicky McClure as Lana in Trigger Point — (Image credit: ITV)

Vicky McClure is the go-to when you want a gruffly efficient uniformed type and here in Jed Mercurio's Trigger Point, she plays Lana a bomb disposal expert who discovers that someone is setting bombs and picking off people one-by-one. It's a role that in other, less expert hands, could be all-too-familiar, but McClure's heartfelt intensity means the audience is right there with her, willing her to succeed, through every twist and turn.

Cillian Murphy — Peaky Blinders

Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders — (Image credit: BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions Ltd./Robert Viglasky)

Cillian Murphy is central to the global hit Peaky Blinders, which recently wrapped up with a very successful final season. It is a masterpiece performance from an actor who bulked up, transforming himself into the intimidating gangster, Thomas Shelby. It's an intensely physical performance but also intensely internal. We try to decipher his thoughts with the flick of an eye or by the gait of his walk. It's subtle and yet full of rage. Perhaps Murphy will be your pick for dramatic performance?

Ben Whishaw — This Is Going to Hurt

Ben Whishaw as Adam Kay in This Is Going To Hurt, standing in front of a blue hospital curtain wearing blue surgical scrubs and pulling on a pair of rubber surgical gloves — (Image credit: BBC)

If you were going to cast someone to play yourself (as Adam Kay has for the adaptation of his book, This Is Going to Hurt), who better than the actor who plays Paddington and Q. The award-winning actor puts in a typically sympathetic performance — adding, as always, depth and sweetness to characters that could come across as cold, flat, or (as with Norman Scott, in A Very English Scandal) frankly unlikeable. It's a rough, unstinting look at the realities of life as a junior doctor in the NHS but Wishaw brings to life all the dark humor and emotion that the role entails.