Paul Clayton is an English actor, director, writer and occasional ringmaster of large groups of adults in conference centres, which is not as easy as it sounds.
On television he’s recently popped up in EastEnders as drag artist Drew Peacock, in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light as Sir William Kingston (gruff authority, excellent posture), and in Brian and Maggie as Bernard Ingham (excellent posture, gruff authority). He also appears as “Dennis” in Disney+’s very popular revival of The Full Monty. He’s just completed filming on several further TV projects, including a prime-time ITV thriller, Secret Service with more work appearing across 2026, assuming nobody changes the schedule again. Which they will.
When he’s not pretending to be other people, Paul works as a creative director and host for large-scale corporate and brand events across the UK and Europe. This involves storytelling, leadership, presentation coaching, the occasional PowerPoint, and an alarming number of radio mics. His particular interest is helping clever people sound as good out loud as they do in their own heads.
He is also a novelist. His latest thriller, My Lie, Your Lie, was released to lovely reviews (which he is trying to read in moderation), following two earlier thrillers that behaved themselves and found readers too. He is currently developing a memoir, Becoming Sophie’s Dad, about adoption, identity, and discovering — slightly later than most — that you are allowed to build a family in your own way.
Paul is a proud patron of Grimm & Co, the Rotherham-based literacy charity that believes stories can change lives, which feels like a very sensible thing to believe in if you make your living telling them.
At heart, Paul is a storyteller — whether that’s on screen, on stage, on the page or in a hotel ballroom at 8.45am trying to wake up a sales team with coffee and optimism. Sometimes all at once.
