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Sam Lowry
Played by: Jonathan Pryce
A hapless, comfortable bureaucrat whose constant daydreams of fighting injustice and finding the woman of his dreams may be premonitions of a terrible future to come when he's promoted to work at the Ministry of Information.- Beleaguered Bureaucrat: This should go without saying, but Lowry somehow manages to up the ante by showing his job to be nothing more than filing each and every one of the formats and reports ranging from simple formalities to outright annihilation orders as well as the government's punching bag when things like paperwork go awry.
- Big Brother Is Employing You: Deconstructed with Lowry and his ordeal through the Ministry of Information. His everyday consists of having to go back and forth asking what he has to do without getting a clear answer from anyone since "it's not their department" and they're real busy themselves, constantly seeing people being taken for Information Retrieval for everyday procedures and having to turn a blind eye to most things going on. And it's not like he is exempt from the ministry's ire. God help him when he gets unavoidably tangled in the toils of Information Retrieval...
- The Big Damn Kiss: Between Sam and Jill once they finally, finally are united in Ida Lowry's apartment.
- Classical Anti-Hero: A normal, everyday man with no special attributes other than an enormous imagination, a great passion for freedom and a need to escape from the monotony and oppression of everyday life in Brazil. Much like Winston, his involvement ends up bringing the few last members of a possible revolution down as well as causing mayhem for everybody.
- Death of Personality: His final fate.
- Declining Promotion: At first, he refused to go work for the Ministry at a desk job, since he feels more comfortable where he is. It's only when trying to help Jill and giving into his mother's ambitions that he accepts the promotion.
- Dreams of Flying: Sam had recurring flight dreams. In one of them, he meets his love interest before meeting her for real.
- The Everyman: He really is absolutely nothing special and initially is quite content with that. Deconstructed because him trying to find something special (Jill, and eventually the excitement of being allegedly one of the rebels) ends in tears.
- False Utopia: Sam's dreams, especially the last one, which turns out to be a mere Hope Spot.
- Gone Horribly Right: A rare and brief heroic example. When Sam decides to rebel against the bureaucracy, he attempts to participate in a terrorist attack. The terrorist he's assisting isn't one, and points out the horrific carnage around them, telling him he needs to help the people hurt.
- Knight in Shining Armor: That's how Sam imagines himself in his Dream Sequences.
- Love Before First Sight: There's a recurring dream Lowry has about a woman whom he's supposed to rescue. He later meets this woman by the name of Jill Layton by a chance encounter in the Ministry of Information.
- Momma's Boy: If his fantasy segment involving her is anything to go by, he simultaneously fears his mother abandoning him while wishing she were dead.
- Mr. Imagination: Has a vivid dreamlife which he thinks about during his waking life. Specifically Jill.
- My Beloved Smother: His mother patronizes him much to his chagrin.
- Percussive Maintenance: Sam oversleeps because his alarm clock stopped working. When he tabs it, it starts up again and runs fast forward to make up for the lost time. It's implied this happens quite often.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: He has posters of movie stars on his bedroom walls.
- Prefers the Illusion: One of the possible endings has him retreat permanently into his Happy Place as a means to escape his torture. Oddly, this isn't as heartbreaking considering the Crapsack World he lives in.
- This Is Your Brain on Evil: Sam enjoys his moment of rebellion when he and Jill Layton escape from Information Retrieval and make a getaway in her cab... until he spots
an innocent bystandera soldier giving chase being slowly burnt to death and realizes how much damage they have caused. - Tragic Hero: He is a complete failure in over his head and seeking happiness without considering the potential consequences, and it ends very badly for him.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Lowry dreams that he is a hero fighting an evil regime. He could not be further from the truth.
Jill Layton
Played by: Kim Greist
- Action Girl: Jill rescues Sam with her truck.
- Bifauxnen: By 80s standards, anyway.
- Damsel in Distress: The fantasy version of her (with the long flowing hair) is this for Sam, although the real-life version is a lot more capable and independent.
- Faking the Dead: First, Sam fakes her death so she won't be pursued. Later, it happens for real.
- Girl of My Dreams: Sam is obsessed with her because he fell in love with her in his dreams.
- Iconic Item: Jill wears a bandage on one of her hands. According to
Word of God, it was added to give her "more personality." - The Last DJ: She notably first appears (outside of Lowry's dreams) trying to deal with the Ministry paperwork to help the Buttle family who are too traumatized from the raid that arrested Harry Buttle to do anything and given the complicated bureaucratic runaround.
- Ms. Fanservice: Sam wakes up to find Jill kneeling on the bed wearing nothing but a smile and a giant ribbon.
- Sound-Only Death: When the militia arrives to capture Lowry, the screen goes black and we hear gunfire, likely directed at her.
- Unperson: Sam has Jill erased from the files at the department which then gets turned against her as her murder by resisting arrest needn't even be covered up.
- Wrench Wench: She drives a truck for a living and wears a grimy pair of overalls.
Harry Tuttle
Played by: Robert De Niro
- The Ace: He's a full-blown Action Hero, both in person and in Sam's imagination.
- Hero of Another Story: His rebellious crusade happens mostly off-screen, and its greater plot importance is the fact that innocent Mr. Buttle was killed as collateral damage.
- The Last DJ: All Tuttle does is fix people's air conditioners without caring about the absurd amount of bureaucracy that is now customary. For this, he's classified as a potential terrorist by the government and marked for death. Which leads to Harry breaking into people's homes in the dead of night to continue his work.
- Nice Guy: He claims that his drive is just the fun and excitement of going to different places and meeting and helping new people rather than some righteous anti-Government motive, though he still makes it clear that he hates the Obstructive Bureaucracy and the fact that sooner or later they'll take over his element.
Jack Lint
Played by: Michael Palin
- Affably Evil: Jack is a perfectly nice, friendly guy who loves his kids and is a good friend to Sam but it doesn't stop him from engaging in horrifying acts of physical and emotional torment on a daily basis, even to his friends.
- Deathly Unmasking: Dressed in his uniform baby-faced mask and about to torture Sam Lowry when he's unexpectedly shot in the head by a rebel sniper. Stumbling around in confusion, he has just enough time to get his mask off - revealing the gaping exit wound in his forehead - before collapsing dead to the ground. And then it's revealed that this never happened.
- Family-Values Villain: Jack is a good family man who justifies his job as torturer as the government has to crack down hard on troublemakers to make a safer world for his children.
- Inspector Javert: He thinks of himself as a clever intelligence operative when he's actually just a glorified interrogator who's so featherbrained that he has difficulty keeping track of the names of his children.
- Fair-Weather Friend: Michael Palin's character is willing to perform Cold-Blooded Torture on longtime friend Sam when circumstances turn against Sam, though it's downplayed in that he's clearly not happy about doing so.
- It's All About Me: When Sam's tearfully begging for mercy in the torture chair, Jack's only response is angrily complain about how Sam's put him in the position of having to torture one of his oldest friends.
- Punch-Clock Villain: He's a white-collar torturer who brings his kids to the office.
- Stepford Smiler: Implied. At one point Sam walks in on Jack having some sort of breakdown in the restroom; once Jack realizes he's not alone, he turns around with his standard banally cheerful smile on his face.
- Torture Technician
- With Friends Like These...: "This is a professional relationship..."
Ida Lowry
Played by: Katherine Helmond
- Magic Plastic Surgery: She regenerates to the point where her last appearance is played by a different actressnote — although it could be argued that was fever-induced.
- Mother Makes You King: Lowry's promotions are all the work of his mother.
- My Beloved Smother: She wishes to help her son climb the ladder of the Ministry, much to Sam's annoyance.
- Rummage Sale Reject: Her fashions look like a terribly expensive version of this.
Spoor
Played by: Bob Hoskins
- Asshole Victim: His death by his environmental suit being filled by sewage and then exploding is horrific, but he is such a jackass that he clearly has it coming.
- Evil Counterpart: To Tuttle. While Tuttle is a freelancer who is shown to be friendly, down-to-earth, and genuinely helpful, Spoor is his exact opposite. A loyal "worker" for Central Services, Spoor is rude, hostile, and utterly lazy.
- Evil Is Petty: He destroys Sam's apartment all because Sam asked him to bring the proper paperwork.
- Expy: Seems to be a parody of the plumber Mario from Super Mario Bros. (a character that Hoskins played in the film version 8 years later).
- Fat and Skinny: The tiny and fat member of the repairmen team from Central Services.
- Jerkass: Spoor is petty, vindictive, obnoxious, and just an all-around unpleasant person.
- Lower-Class Lout: He comes across this way, being a boorish and crude blue-collar worker who only does his job if he can screw over people he doesn't like while dong so.
Dowser
Played by: Derrick O'Connor
- Asshole Victim: His death by his environmental suit being filled by sewage and then exploding is horrific, but he is such a jackass that he clearly has it coming.
- Beware the Silly Ones: He seems to be the sillier of the two between him and Spoor, but he can be very intimidating, like when he violently prevents Sam from closing his door on them and forcefully come in with his partner.
- Freak Out: He has an immediate panic attack just on hearing about Form 27B/6.
- Those Two Guys: He's usually seen together with Spoor.
- Trauma Button: When Sam asks for a Form 27B/6 to let them into his home to make repairs, Dowser has a complete Freak Out until Spoor hits him back to his senses with a wrench.
- Verbal Tic: He tends to parrot Spoor's sentences.
Alma Terrain
Played by: Barbara Hicks
- From Bad to Worse: Her declining health — "there's been a little complication with my complication".
- Magic Plastic Surgery: Subverted: She's promised this, but deteriorates instead, to the point of Ludicrous Gibs."My complication had a complication..."
Shirley Terrain
Played by: Kathryn Pogson
- Abhorrent Admirer: Averted. As she tells Sam, "Don't worry, I don't like you either."
- Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: Her brace contraption is comically large.
Archibald Buttle
Played by: Brian Miller
- Acquitted Too Late: The mistake leading to his death is being noticed too late.
- Mistaken Identity: He is mistaken for Harry Tuttle due to a typo on a form.
Ms. Veronica Buttle
Played by: Sheila Reid
- Broken Bird: Turns into this after the fateful events around her husband.
