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In recent years he's appeared in the Chloe Grace Moretz movie 'Brain On Fire,' the animated fantasy action show 'Castlevania,' two Harlan Coben adaptations 'The Stranger' and 'Stay Close' and the erotic thriller series 'Obsession'.
In most of these projects his characters are flawed and enigmatic.
So lo and behold, 2024 has begun with Richard Amitage as a flawed and enigmatic husband in 'Fool Me Once' - yet another Netflix series fashioned out of a Harlan Coben novel.
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I'm sure Armitage is a nice bloke but you kind of get the impression that if a British TV series is pitched to Netflix these days their stipulation for making it is that there must be a flawed and enigmatic part for Richard Armitage.
Armitage plays Joe Burkett, the flawed and enigmatic husband of Michelle Keegan's disgraced former British soldier.
Not only is he flawed and enigmatic, he's meant to be dead.
When we first see Maya, she is picking up the pieces after witnessing her flawed and enigmatic husband being shot in a public park at night.
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This means have to deal with his overbearing, haughty mother, Joanna Lumley's Judith Burkett and her demands to see her very young granddaughter, Thea Taylor-Morgan's Lily.
The tension between them isn't just about family.
There's a class thing going on.
The Burketts are wealthy, having made their fortune on pharmaceuticals.
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Joe went to public school and met Maya, whose more modest working class roots we're told little of, at a fancy dress event.
They married and all appears to have been bliss until Joe was mysteriously shot.
But here's the thing: Maya's sister Natalie Anderson's Claire was also gunned down months earlier in her home, leaving behind a very angry husband, Marcus Garvey's Eddie Walker and two confused teenage kids, Danya Griver's Abby and Daniel Burt's Dan.
Because she has an interest in owning guns, Maya is a person of interest for the police and, as a result of this line of enquiry, she's not a big fan of Adeel Akhtar's DS Sami Kierce who is leading the investigation.
© NetflixSami, however, has troubles of his own.
An alcoholic who has been off the booze for three years, he keeps suffering blackouts and has crashed more than one car while on duty.
Following his latest crash, he is told he has to babysit a way too enthusiastic new colleague, Dino Fetscher's Marty McGreggor.
Sami's also withheld the truth about his blackouts from his pregnant fiance, Clara Indrani's nursery worker Molly Sardana ahead of their wedding.
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Given a digital picture frame by Jade Anouka's Nicole Butler that can also be used as a camera to spy on a nanny provided by the Burketts, Natalia Kostrzewa's Isabella, Maya is shocked to see her flawed and enigmatic husband appear onscreen with her daughter.
However when she challenges Isabella about it, the nanny pepper sprays Maya and absconds with the SD card that was inside the picture frame.
Digging deeper into Joe's apparent death and Claire's, she establishes a potential link to Laurie Knyaston's blogger Corey 'The Whistle' Rudzinski who originally leaked footage of Maya when she was a soldier that sparked a public scandal.
As Maya and Sami conduct separate investigations, with the former relying on her military police buddy Emmett J Scanlan's Shane Tessier, question marks start to surface about Corey, the Burketts and Joe's public school past.
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'Fool Me Once' continues Netflix's tradition of crediblity stretching north of England thrillers based on Coben novels adapted by Danny Brocklehurst and a team of writers.
On this occasion, Brocklehurst has assembled Charlotte Coben, Yemi Oyefuwa, Nina Metivier and Tom Farrelly to write the scripts, with David Moore and Nimer Rashed on directorial duties.
While the show is an improvement on 2022's 'Stay Close,' that's not actually saying very much because it's still pretty feeble.
Once again - and I know I'm sounding like a broken record - we have a British made TV series that's all about the cliffhanger and plot twists and not about maintaining credibility.
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'Fool Me Once' drops its underwhelming cliffhangers and plot twists like a toddler dropping vegetables during meal time and the consequences are just as messy.
It's full of British thriller cliches. There's loads of scenes with characters having intense investigative conversations on mobile phones.
There's flashbacks galore - covering Joe's public school days, the death of another Burkett sibling, Maya's time in the Army, and fond memories of Claire.
As expected, we get intense police interrogations and cars racing around at moments of what's meant to be high drama.
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There's a rooftop pursuit and we're meant to be dazzled by the show's hi-tech wizardry and appalled by the antics of Big Pharma.
Naturally, some lead characters' motives do not always turn out to be what they first seem.
It's hard to care about all this, though, because Brocklehurst and his team of writers are just trying too hard to pull too many rabbits out of a very underwhelming selection of hats.
And the biggest rabbits - one involving DS Kierce and another the show's denouement - are just not convincing enough and feel more like pookas.
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While clearly relishing her lead part, Keegan is still reduced to mostly scowling and beating up anyone who challenges her.
Like Siobhan Finneran and Stephen Rea in 'The Stranger,' Akhtar has nothing to prove as a actor but even with his talent he still cannot prop up an unbelievable script.
Scanlan is also poorly served and mumbles his way through proceedings.
Knyaston, Garvey, Griver, Burt, Indrani, Anouka, Kostrzewa, Hattie Morahan and James Northcote as Joe's siblings and Joe Armstrong as the mysterious Alexander Dosman have to endure a lot.
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Nicholas Farrell, another actor with a decent pedigree, turns up and gets paid for a stock portrayal of a public school headmaster.
However the most shockingly bad performances come from Lumley and Fletcher who seems to mistakenly believe he's playing Andy from the US version of 'The Office'.
Lumley really ought to know better but seems to sleepwalk her way through proceedings.
Fletcher is just irritating.
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At first glance, 'Fool Me Once' looks like a deliciously ironic title for the show.
The problem is we've been fooled so often with Netflix Coben adaptations in English, Polish, French and Spanish we're losing count.
But hey, look on the bright side - at least Armitage got another chance to play flawed and enigmatic.
('Fool Me Once' was made available for streaming on Netflix on January 1, 2024)
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