Alex Wyndham Headshots | Rory Lewis Photographer, Los Angeles

Alex Wyndham Headshots | Rory Lewis Photographer, Los Angeles

There's a particular pleasure in a sitter you clock the moment they come through the door, and Alex Wyndham was one of them — Maecenas himself, Octavian's silken fixer from the second season of Rome, standing in my Downtown LA studio some seventeen years on and none the worse for it. I confess I said as much straight away, which is not always the done thing with actors, but there it was. One doesn't forget a face that spent a whole season murmuring political poison into a young Caesar's ear.

Here's the pleasing symmetry: Wyndham read history at Oxford before RADA got hold of him, so we were two men in a dark room who'd both rather talk about the past than the present. That tends to make my job easier. A sitter who understands that a portrait is an argument, not a snapshot, settles into the light differently — less performance, more presence.

Alex Wyndham Headshots | Rory Lewis Photographer, Los Angeles

And the light did most of the talking. I kept the background where I like it, a slate that falls away into near-black at the edges, and let a single key do the work of carving him out of it. This is the whole tenebrist bargain, of course — you don't light the man so much as you decide what to surrender to shadow. Wyndham has good bones for it: the brow, the set of the jaw, that faintly sardonic steadiness around the eyes. Caravaggio would have known exactly what to do with him, and I'd like to think I did too.

We ran three looks across the afternoon — the charcoal denim, arms folded and squared to camera for something with a bit of steel in it, and the brown cord shirt for a warmer, quieter register, the head turned just off axis so the shadow could pool along one cheek. He gave me stillness when I asked for it, which is rarer than people imagine. Most sitters fidget toward a smile. Wyndham held the gravity.

A thoroughly good afternoon's work, and a rare thing — a portrait subject who'd have understood the pictures before I'd even taken them.