Rob Lowe, bobby on the beat? The US A-listers who ended up on British TV
The West Wing star has a new role as a hard-bitten Miami cop decamping to Lincolnshire, in ITV drama Wild Bill. But he’s not the first American to make the unlikely transatlantic move
US television is packed with British actors. They are easy to spot because they’re cheap and classy, and their accents aren’t quite specific enough to convince. But it’s much less common to find American actors on British TV, which makes ITV’s new Lincolnshire-set Rob Lowe vehicle Wild Bill something of a curio.
In Wild Bill, Rob Lowe plays – well, he plays Rob Lowe. That’s sort of the point. He is a hard-bitten Miami cop who becomes chief constable of the fictional East Lincolnshire police to stem a tide of violent crimes. He is a glamorous American fish deliberately playing as far out of water as he can. Just to underline the notion that this is a TV show about an American in Britain, the Wild Bill promotional material contains shots of Lowe wearing a cowboy hat, in the way all Americans are legally mandated to do. It’s jarring, but this isn’t the first instance of a big US star slumming it on British TV. Here are Lowe’s forebears.