There is a photograph in the new retrospective of Anthony Head's career that sums him up perfectly. He is standing in a sun-drenched kitchen, a mug of instant coffee in hand, looking not like an actor selling a product but like a friend who has just popped round for a chat. It is the same quality that made him the nation's favourite dad in Ted Lasso, a show that somehow makes you forgive the Americans for their insistence on calling it soccer.
The exhibition, opening this week at the National Portrait Gallery's annexe, charts a curious arc: from that 1990s Nescafe Gold Blend campaign that turned a coffee commercial into a national obsession, through his gilded turn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the quiet, crumpled dignity of Ted Lasso. It is a career that has been defined less by leading-man bravado and more by a kind of respectable ordinariness, the ability to embody the man next door while never quite being one of us.
What is most striking, however, is not the spread of glossy stills but the human story they tell. Here is an actor who could have coasted on the easy charm of that ad campaign, cashing in on a decade of being Britain's favourite imaginary boyfriend. Instead, he chose to disappear into character roles, playing the monstrous Giles in Buffy with a patrician chill that suggested libraries could be dangerous places. It was a performance that no one quite saw coming, least of all the advertisers who had sold him as the safe, warm option.
And then there is the cultural shift he now represents. Ted Lasso arrived at a moment when the world needed kindness, and Head's portrayal of a father trying to hold his family together was the quiet anchor of the show. In an era of noise, his character was a voice of reason, a reminder that decency still has its place. The exhibition captures this with a sequence of black and white portraits shot in his garden, where he looks tired but content, like a man who knows he has done his best work by simply being present.
Yet there is also a melancholy thread running through the collection. The Nescafe campaign now seems like a relic from a more innocent time, when a cup of instant coffee could be a promise of romance. The world has moved on, become more cynical, more suspicious of easy warmth. But Head's career testifies to the fact that we still crave it, even if we pretend otherwise. The retrospective is not just a celebration of one actor's journey. It is a mirror held up to the changing nature of fame in Britain, from the aspirational to the authentic, from the ad man's dream to the nation's reassuring uncle.
The final photograph is the most telling. Head sits on a park bench, a cup of tea in hand (Nescafe, mercifully, has been retired), smiling at something off camera. It is the look of a man who has survived the industry's fickle tides by never trying to be anything other than what he is. In a profession built on artifice, that is the rarest gift of all.
