Paul Higgins is a Scottish actor, best known for appearing in the British television series The Thick of It, Utopia and Line of Duty. Higgins was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, but now he considers himself a lapsed Catholic. As a teenager, he trained to be a priest, but gave his training up aged 17 when he began dating. Higgins has appeared onstage in Paul and Black Watch, and in the film Complicity. He played Alan in Staying Alive, a hospital drama on ITV. He has also played Jamie McDonald, an aggressive press officer, in the BBC show The Thick of It and its spin-off feature-length film, In the Loop. In 2009, he appeared as Gil Cameron on the BBC drama Hope Springs. He played Michael Dugdale in Channel 4's acclaimed conspiracy thriller Utopia. In 2013 he appeared in series 1 of the BBC series Line of Duty and returned for season 4 in 2017. He wrote a play titled Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, which was performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland in November 2008.