Judi Dench’s strength as an actor lies in the believability of the characters she portrays. She plays a part with such conviction that, whether the character is inherently likeable or not, you care about her and want to know her fate. In smaller roles where Dench’s screen time is more limited, her characters carry the overall narrative forward, even if she’s merely mentioned in passing, making her always memorable.

Our first look at Dench’s character – romance author Miss Eleanor Lavish – in James Ivory’s 1985 period drama A Room with a View is around the dinner table at a guest house in Florence. She has command of the conversation, discussing the topic of travel among a group of fellow lodgers and tourists. She comes off as a bit of a brazen swashbuckler, who’s travelled many places solo (an anomaly for women at that time) seeking inspiration for her next novel.

Dench is the embodiment of free spiritedness in this role. Observational and fastidious to the highest degree, Lavish is a character that truly savors life, from stopping to exult old statues, or sitting in a field to drink in the scenery. She takes much delight in finding romance in the smallest of details. This makes for some comical moments, such as when she enthusiastically inhales the city air and encourages her walking companion Charlotte Bartlett (played by Dench’s dear offscreen friend Dame Maggie Smith) to do the same who, in turn, does so and stifles a retch.

It’s easy to trace Dench’s path to the icon status she holds today. She had a long and storied career in the theatre in the sixties and seventies, performing a host of roles including (a lot of) Shakespeare and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She had her first bit parts in films The Third Secret in 1964 and Four in the Morning in 1965, and made many TV show appearances before starring alongside her husband Michael Williams in the sitcom A Fine Romance, which ran from 1981 to 1984.

In Charles Sturridge’s 1988 film A Handful of Dust, Dench plays a mother to a home wrecking son. Like A Room with a View, A Handful of Dust is also based on a novel, but this time set in the early 1930s. As Mrs. Beaver, Dench is a stylish social climbing businesswoman. A bit of a busybody, Mrs. Beaver likes to organize things, from arranging for a flat rental to erecting a memorial for people she’s not particularly close with, though she claims to be. She lives well enough, but she does have to work, and it’s evident that she’d love to change her situation.

Mrs. Beaver appears generous and cheerful and dotes on her son, almost to a creepy degree. But she’s also cunning, ruthlessly shrewd, and practical. From the outset, she has her sights set on her son marrying a soon-to-be divorcée he’s been having an affair with, hoping that with some prodding she’ll coax her to demand a substantial alimony of £2000 a year instead of the more modest £500 her husband has offered. As soon as it’s clear this would-be daughter-in-law will not be flush in her settlement, Mrs. Beaver and her son lose interest and take off for America.

While Dench’s performances are always fun to watch, it’s her fluid adaptability that draws audiences to her films; and with every sort of character under her belt, Dench cannot be typecast. She delivers perfectly imperfect human qualities to her performances which make them believable, and can be as condescending and manipulative as she can be nurturing and fearless.

A completely different role saw Dench in David Jones’ 1987 feature 84 Charing Cross Road as the Irish Nora Doel, wife to Anthony Hopkins’ Frank Doel. Based on writer Helene Hanff’s epistolary memoir, this film tells the story of Hanff’s nearly 20-year correspondence with head buyer Frank for Marks & Co, an antiquarian bookshop in London, from 1949 to 1968. Nora is Frank’s second wife, after his first passed during the war.

Throughout the film, we get little glimpses into their marriage, watching Nora’s meals grow more ornate the more practiced she becomes, seeing the pair impulsively join a conga line on a date, and looking on as they decorate for Christmas or repaint the living room. While she’s not quick to smile, when she does you can tell it’s not for show. She takes great pride in her family, who are her world.

At the end of the film, Nora writes to Helene (Anne Bancroft) about the death of Frank, and her loss is palpable. In a grey sweater with her hair pulled back, crestfallen and worn out from grief, she writes “I miss him so, life was so interesting, he always explaining, and trying to teach me something of books.”

Dench’s film career really blossomed in the mid-nineties, with culturally iconic roles such as the laser-focused and exacting MI6 head M, starting with 1995’s GoldenEye, whom she would play in eight Bond films until her departure in 2012’s Skyfall, with a cameo in 2015’s Spectre. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Queen Elizabeth I in 1998’s Shakespeare in Love and suddenly she was everywhere, with some of her most memorable characters yet to come.

Denzel Washington is a mighty actor, in possession of a gravitas most can only dream of, more than able to lend his talent to the works of Shakespeare or portraying major historical figures like Malcolm X. Yet for decades now he’s also seemed to relish working on material that should be well beneath someone of his stature, enjoying the task of pulling ropey scripts and concepts up to his level. Early reviews have widely deemed him the best part of Ridley Scott’s uneven Gladiator II; his history of elevating the source material is long-standing.

Though he came to fame in the eighties, going from a lead on TV medical drama St. Elsewhere to an Oscar winner for Glory in just seven short years, the nineties were when Washington truly became a megastar. The decade gave us his towering turns in Malcolm X, Crimson Tide, Philadelphia, and The Hurricane – big, muscular movies, often centered around his commanding presence. Scattered among those, however, were a handful that were just…silly. But those movies, as much as the ones that won him all his deserved acclaim, show why his star has remained ascendant for so many years.

In the first, 1991’s Ricochet, Washington is a cop – Nick Styles – who puts psychopathic killer Earl Talbot Blake (John Lithgow) in jail. Eight years later, Blake manages to bust out. He heads straight for Styles – now an Assistant District Attorney –  with revenge on his mind Ricochet’s premise is conventional, but the violence is intense – at one point, a man gets a circular saw straight through the belly. In true 1990s style, almost every bloody act is accompanied by a gleeful, profane witticism; it’s the kind of movie where an impalement is met with “You got the point now, don’t you?”

In his entire filmography, it’s hard to pick out a scene that more encapsulates Washington’s charismatic resplendence than when he first arrests Lithgow’s villain at a nighttime carnival. Styles gets a gun on Blake, but when an unaware woman steps out of a nearby port-a-potty, Blake takes her hostage. To persuade him to release her, Styles makes a show of disarming himself, even stripping down to his boxers to prove he has no hidden weapon or armour, all the while trying to calm the terrified woman. Blake then pushes her aside and launches himself at Styles – who somehow has managed to hide a gun, and manages to subdue the criminal.

Ricochet is a ludicrous movie, yet it makes Washington’s charm textual in a way that would set the scene for many a future film of his. And four years later, things got sillier still for him in Virtuosity.

Here Washington plays Parker Barnes: a former cop convicted for killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. Barnes and other convicts have been part of testing for a virtual reality training programme meant to pit police against SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe), an AI programmed on the personalities of 200 serial killers – including the one who killed Barnes’ family. When a renegade technician brings SID 6.7 into the real world, Barnes is the only one who can stop him.

Russell Crowe has by far the flashiest role in Virtuosity, and he sure does enjoy it, oozing merry malevolence, and making a three-course meal out of each of his cruel taunts (12 years later the two actors would face off again in American Gangster, where Washington got the showier villain part). Between Crowe’s hammy psychopathy and the movie’s fascination with VR – the effects now look endearingly dated but were at the time considered cutting edge – it’s just Washington’s steady performances as the grieving, furious hero that gives Virtuosity any kind of emotional weight. His willingness to put the charisma on a low boil, to cede the humour and spectacle to Crowe while he deals with the heavy stuff, is almost solely responsible for keeping the whole thing from bursting apart at the seams.

Washington played a police officer once again in the final film of his nineties trilogy of nonsense – 1998’s Fallen. Though his character, John Hobbes, watches serial killer Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas) put to death, somehow that doesn’t stop the string of murders carried out to Reese’s macabre modus operandi. At first Hobbes and his fellow cops assume there’s a copycat on the loose. Before long, he learns the real culprit lies in a different realm entirely.

The full absurdity of Fallen takes a while to make itself known. Directed by Gregory Hoblit, straight after his hugely successful Primal Fear, and co-starring Donald Sutherland, John Goodman, and James Gandolfini, it looks comparatively classy next to the twin lunacies of Ricochet and Virtuosity…until it’s revealed that it’s Reese’s demonic spirit continuing his murder spree, using unwitting bodies (mainly human, sometimes feline!) as his vessels, and passing between them via touch. For the remainder of the movie, Washington effectively finds himself playing tag with a demon.

Even after Fallen has unveiled the heights of its silliness, Washington remains commanding. In the scene where he’s told what’s really going on, he moves from “Oh, come on!” scepticism to whole-hearted belief in a matter of seconds, making his personal change of mind convincing, and (at least temporarily) bringing us along with him. It may be a preposterous movie, but it’s a masterful performance.

Washington’s habit of mixing high and low art expanded well out beyond the nineties, most notably in his frequent collaborations with director Tony Scott. Across five films, from 1995 to 2010, the actor time travelled, stopped runaway trains, and saved the day in countless other ways, elevating schlocky material into the stuff of poetry. After that came The Equalizer movies, where Washington took his ex-CIA agent on a surprisingly moving emotional arc, through a myriad of violent, often outrageous set pieces. Time and again, from the nineties to the present day, he’s made even the most throwaway of movies feel utterly gripping.

In a very real sense, making nonsense films like Ricochet, Virtuosity, and Fallen emotionally credible is every inch as challenging as the trickiest Shakespearian soliloquy. That Washington excels at both is a major part of what makes him such a peerless screen presence and us in the audience so lucky to have him.

The thing with Ving Rhames is the voice.

It’s how we’re first introduced to him in Pulp Fiction, where Quentin Tarantino shoots him initially from behind, the back of his head and its now iconic plaster (band-aid, if you’re American) the only visual reference we have for crime boss Marsellus Wallace, until then a phantom figure spoken about in anecdote and fear. While the back of his head tells us precious little, it’s the voice that fills the knowledge gap: his deep distinctive bass telling Bruce Willis to “Fuck Pride” while Al Green’s contradictory falsetto fills the room.

The voice is also how we’re introduced to Rhames in his first major feature role, directed by Paul Schrader in 1988’s Patty Hearst, a hard-to-find film worth seeking out for myriad reasons, chief among them Rhames’ dictatorial turn as the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army who capture, radicalise, and then release the eponymous heiress. Schrader is in expressionistic Mishima mode at the start of the film, shooting in hazy montage while Rhames intones over the images, only half-seen in shadows, standing in doorways, lit just enough for us to know that he is absolutely jacked as beams of light bend around his sweat-streaked muscles.

As cinematic introductions go, it’s a moment that makes us sit up straight in our seats. By the time Schrader shoots him in the centre of a dark room punctured by bullet holes, Rhames is sermonising, modulating his voice like a great singer, his pronunciation odd and powerful, motored by an abnormal cadence that webs his words in rage and spit: pig becomes PEEI-g, America is Ameri-KAH. If the film sags in the middle, it’s because that’s when Rhames disappears, taking much of the electricity of the opening hour with him. This would become a common theme throughout his career.

Rhames played similar roles in the years leading up to Pulp Fiction: short, forceful appearances for iconoclastic directors, appearing for a couple of booming, bombastic scenes before ceding stage to the stars: Lt. Reilly in Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (where Rhames’ offscreen voice is the first thing we hear); a haunted Vietnam vet in Jacob’s Ladder, and cop-killer Randolph in David Mamet’s Homicide. In Mamet’s film, Rhames is again shot mostly in darkness for his key scene, his voice reverberating around a dank cellar while he towers above a wounded Joe Mantegna.

Then came Pulp Fiction, which doesn’t need recapitulating here except to say that it’s strange it didn’t send Rhames stratospheric the way it did Sam Jackson or Uma Thurman. Or maybe it’s not. Despite his domineering presence – after his voice, the next thing to notice is just how impressively Rhames manipulates his body and the authority it demands; it’s no coincidence that he is often cast as a leader or paterfamilias of some sort – Rhames is a supporting player at heart, rarely receiving top billing and seemingly unbothered by it.

A true character actor who trained at Julliard, Rhames’ big moment of industry recognition came at the 1998 Golden Globes, where Rhames won Best Actor for his portrayal of Don King in the TV miniseries, Don King: Only in America. King was a rare lead role for Rhames, and his Best Actor nod is the only time he has ever won a major award for his art (he was nominated for an Emmy for the same role). In his acceptance speech, Rhames did something unusual: he gave the award to Jack Lemmon, saying “I feel like being an artist is about giving, and I’d like to give this to you.” Awards mean little, of course – Brain De Palma has never even been nominated for an Academy Award – but it’s noticeable that Rhames has only ever been honoured for his television work despite delivering a bevvy of supporting performances seemingly ripe for Oscar nominations.

After his Globes moment, Rhames continued to do what he had always done, and despite Pulp Fiction – and his old acquaintance with De Palma – getting him the Mission: Impossible gig that he still holds to this day, his work in the aftermath of Pulp was more of the same, including small turns for Soderbergh and Scorsese. The latter provided one of Rhames’ finest, the actor wild and charismatic as Marcus, a cigar-chomping Christian paramedic who brings some much-needed levity to Bringing Out the Dead, a profound study of grief and depression that finds time for Rhames to hold a hilarious and impromptu séance in order to try and bring a character called I.B. Bangin’ back to life.

Before those two performances, though, Rhames helmed John Singleton’s Rosewood, an underseen and important film that stands as the only example of the actor as a true lead. Here Rhames plays heroic as a war veteran (again) who inspires the titular town to self-defence against white invaders. But it’s another performance for Singleton that serves as the best precis of Rhames’ art, by turns swaggering, terrifying and tender.

That film is Baby Boy, where Rhames plays Melvin, the new boyfriend of the titular character’s mom. As with Pulp Fiction, Rhames enters the frame filmed from behind, his signature shaved head sweating. In place of the Pulp Fiction plaster, there’s a nasty scar, striped across his skin like fat through a steak. Jody (aka Baby Boy, played by Tyrese Gibson) marks Melvin as a thug, and gives him the requisite short thrift, setting the macho tension that carries through the film and into real life, too – Tyrese has said “I was not acting in Baby Boy…Ving Rhames definitely triggered the shit out of me. I don’t like [him] to this day.”

Despite allusions to his past as a gangster, Melvin is presented as reformed, and used accordingly as an imposing but comic figure at first: he goes from being dressed in an ostentatious wine-dark suit replete with purple fedora before a date, to having athletic, hilarious sex with Jody’s mom after it (“your gon’ give me a cavity”), to cooking breakfast naked but for socks and sliders the next morning. But then the pressure between him and his new stepson pops its lid, and Melvin has the anaconda of his arm around Jody’s neck, telling him what he used to do to boys like him in prison. As a sinister little coda to the chokehold, Rhames licks Tyrese’s bald head before letting him go, an inspired piece of actorly improvisation, funny and savage.

As noted throughout this piece, with Ving Rhames, it’s often the voice that directors highlight and audiences remember. And yet his best moment in Baby Boy – maybe in his whole career – is silent, during a wordless scene between Melvin and Jody, as Rhames communicates only with his eyes as he gracefully, insistently moves a gun away from a suicidal Jody’s face, wiping it in a rag as he backs out of the room. The look he gives Jody – the way that his deadly body slumps and softens to convey delicacy – tells him that they have reached something approaching amnesty, and, more touching still, that all is going to be okay through his support.

Rhames’ career has for a long time now been made up of the Mission: Impossible imprimatur and DTV work, to the point that Baby Boy, way back in 2001, might’ve been his last truly great performance. But that’s no matter. Stepping aside after doing something astonishing is just what Ving Rhames does.

It is with a juvenile excitement belying her 22 years of age that Saoirse shuffles from foot to foot in a convenience store in the latter half of Lady Bird. “It’s my birthday today,” she insists on telling the cashier, “which is why all these things. I can buy them.” She perfectly encapsulates the newly 18-year-old drunk on the power of being able to buy scratchcards and cigarettes, even if they don’t necessarily like them. Her turn as Lady Bird – whose birth name is Christine – is so believably earnest. Her longing and boredom seep through the screen as Ronan rolls out of a moving car to avoid an argument with her mother, stands in the middle of the pavement to shriek after her first kiss and lies that one of the huge houses close to the school is hers.

Lady Bird is so effective as a film about teenage girls, mothers and daughters because it feels so lived. The characters have arguments that we can remember having – Lady Bird is snippy as she shops for prom dresses because she feels strange wearing them. She tries out for school musicals and buys forbidden things at the grocery store and wants to be interesting so badly that she changes the way she is and regrets it later.

Compare this performance to what we have seen so far in her upcoming film The Outrun, the trailer of which includes a poignant line spoken by Saoirse: “There is only so much height any wave can sustain before it comes crashing down.”

Based on a 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film follows 29-year-old Rona as she leaves her life in London and treatment for alcohol abuse and returns home to Orkney. Although lonely, she takes solace in the wildness of the sea and land, trying to heal from the events that led to her situation and addiction. This may seem like heavy subject matter compared to that of Ronan’s other well-known works – she is perhaps best known in recent years for her performances in coming-of-age films such as Little Women (2019) and Lady Bird (2017), both directed by Greta Gerwig.

Saoirse Ronan is no stranger to contrast when it comes to her films. For the last ten years or so of her career, she has repeatedly juxtaposed the fiery adolescent and the established young woman, starring in Brooklyn and then Lady Bird, On Chesil Beach and then Little Women. To continue her pattern of alternating coming-of-age and historical pieces, after The Outrun Ronan is also set to star in Blitz, set in the heart of the Second World War, which premieres on 9 October at London Film Festival. While every actor has to display an element of range, it is the contrast between these two specific genres that is so fascinating about her career.

The thing that Ronan brings to all of these, that ties them together, is her ability to smoothly depict a character undergoing a great transformation throughout the course of the film. Rona’s hair, dyed a bright and brilliant blue during her time in London, slowly grows out to its natural colour as she returns to the islands and to herself. Lady Bird, wearing a name she gave to herself in rejection of the one her parents chose for her, grows more assured that she needn’t force herself to be more interesting and begins once more to introduce herself as Christine. Jo March comes to see that her sisters’ dreams are as valid as her own and sees her novel published.

Ronan has clearly settled into her ability to play older characters, but many of her best-known performances now are within these coming-of-age pieces. In them she plays the uncertain and the fiery, those who have not yet found their place in the world. Even in The Outrun she plays somebody who has lost her place in the world, now finding it once again. Perhaps it is surprising that this works time and time again – for years there have been grumblings within the film and television industries about teenage characters being cast as adults and feeling unconvincing. Not when it comes to Ronan. The reason for this lies, perhaps, in how many of us first met her: in her debut as a child actress.

Saoirse Ronan’s film debut occurred in 2007, when she was only eleven years old. The film in question was I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which she plays the protagonist’s daughter, Izzie, a girl crushing on a boy in her class and vying to win him over. In the same year she played Briony in Atonement, an infatuated teenage girl who makes a vital mistake that gets the wrong man convicted of a crime – the role to score her an Academy Award nomination at just twelve. Ronan has now garnered four such nominations, all before thirty – the first for Best Supporting Actress and the subsequent three for Best Actress.

A role lesser known than her Atonement breakout, perhaps, is also her first lead role – as the spirited Lina Mayfleet in the 2008 sci-fi adventure flick City of Ember. Compared with her previous roles, Lina is one of the characters with the most agency and drive in the film’s story – it is up to her, along with a classmate, to rescue their community from the deteriorating underground city they have been sheltering in after a global disaster. Lively and determined, through Lina Saoirse could display all the desirable qualities of a protagonist and a character actor. Despite the film’s mixed reception, even negative reviews could agree on one thing – whatever their thoughts on the worldbuilding and story, Ronan’s performance was the strongest element. She was branded by Cinemablend as a “fantastic heroine” even in a poor review.

Little surprise, then, that after this lead role came another – Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. This was a much darker film, certainly, with Ronan playing a murdered girl watching over her loved ones. Even in this role, though, she is not passive. Though she is confined to the afterlife she endures her own conflict as to whether she should try to reveal her killer to her family. A dead girl is played as still being full of life, owing to the vibrance of Ronan’s performance.

The number of iconic roles she has been known for from an early age could, perhaps, contribute to her popularity for these coming-of-age films – it is easy to believe that Ronan still inhabits these years when we have seen her come of age on the big screen all this time. Ever since her onscreen debut we have seen her develop as an actor, trying out a range of roles from Mary Queen of Scots to a teenage assassin. Every time we see her explore this theme of finding one’s own voice it feels realistic because we have seen it before and watched her triumph.

Saoirse Ronan was described, by an interviewer for Time Out in 2013, as “the most teenage teenage actress” they had ever met, buying Urban Outfitters bomber jackets, wearing Doc Martens and remaining close with her parents, who had accompanied her to the set of every one of her films until she was old enough to be unattended. “Child stars are not meant to grow up normal,” the interviewer noted, “they’re meant to grow up wild like weeds, into tangled messes. Not this child star.”

Perhaps it is in part the supportive and safe environment Ronan had as a teen actor which allows her to thrive within the coming-of-age genre today – it is easier, surely, to be in touch with those years of her life when her family worked for her to have something approaching normality within them. Surely more actors should be allowed the space to have these typical coming-of-age experiences for herself, rather than being as isolated and idolised as many child stars in the industry are made to be. Ronan’s coming-of-age films such as Lady Bird feel sincere and human because her own experiences, it seems, have been too.

As compelling as Ronan’s more emotionally fraught performances are, her dry assuredness means that one of her most enjoyable roles in recent years has been in the 2022 whodunnit film See How They Run – will she extend her remarkable range to some more comedy next?

If he wanted to, Dan Stevens could be a huge Hollywood movie star; a proper leading man for the ages. He’s conventionally handsome, after all, with light eyes and sandy brown hair – physical conventions shared by rising star du jour Glen Powell. At the same time, he’s chameleonic in his capacity to portray different archetypes; the rugged adventurer, the clean-cut American war hero, the love interest, the mysterious benefactor, the Disney prince. He embraces different accents as if he’s trying on costumes at a wardrobe fitting, slipping in and out of each character with ease; in Cuckoo, he has adopted a light German lilt, as convincing a part of his ensemble as his wide-rimmed glasses or carefully carved wooden bird call flute.

Off-screen, Stevens is charming and charismatic; a clip of his good-natured amusement in response to a newscaster’s unwitting innuendo has gone viral on social media. For Letterboxd, he named Withnail and I and Being John Malkovich as his favorite films alongside The Muppet Christmas Carol. In another life, it would be Dan Stevens Summer, with Tiktok fancams dedicated to candid interview clips and thirst traps, and his name attached to headline a new tentpole blockbuster. However, his resume reflects a different path than many of his contemporaries, with a focus on independent work and collaboration with auteur filmmakers experimenting with genre. With his recent turns as the mysterious Dr. Koenig in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, as well as the criminal cop Frank in Abigail, Stevens showcases perhaps the most important weapon of his arsenal: a sustained dedication to genre cinema which has accepted his versatility in kind.

It’s important to note that the breakout role which served to establish Stevens to both British and American audiences was as the uptight heir-apparent Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. We were first introduced to Matthew as a reluctant upperclassman, unashamed of his own status of humble solicitor and imbuing his character with a certain affability. Much of his screentime is spent attempting to woo the de facto protagonist of the show, Mary Crawley – that is, when they’re not arguing about who is more fit to inherit the eponymous estate. Such a fraught will-they-won’t-they dynamic served to propel their narrative forward for the first few seasons of the show, and in this role as a love interest, Stevens seemed comfortable playing second fiddle.

With wide, watery blue eyes and blonde hair finely cropped and coiffed, Stevens conveyed a naïveté about the reality of life as a gentleman, one which eventually hardened into a world-weary romanticism. It was strategic, then, when Adam Wingard cast Stevens as the mysterious “David” – the usage of quotation marks a pointed one – in the low-budget independent thriller The Guest (2014), now celebrating its tenth anniversary. Though his departure from Downton Abbey had been abrupt and, at least narratively, quite tragic, Stevens’ shift away from English heritage shlock served as a kind of rebirth for his career.

Such a transition was accompanied by a dramatic physical change. Perhaps the charm of Matthew Crawley was in the character’s capacity for wit, or his honor and loyalty toward his family, but not necessarily for any abundance of shirtless scenes. For The Guest, however, Stevens initially lost nearly thirty pounds, before then packing on enough muscle to be reasonably convincing as an American soldier.

At the beginning of the film, David arrives on the doorstep of the Peterson household, a family whose son was recently killed in action. He claims to be their son’s best friend paying his respects and a photo of the two on the family’s mantlepiece seems to prove his story. However, the daughter Anna Peterson, played by Maika Monroe, remains wary while the rest of the Peterson family begins to accept this mysterious man into their home. Of course, it helps that David is also polite, endearingly genial with a good ol’ Southern boy nature; it’s a nimble performance by Stevens, as he threads the needle between charming and sinister.

Wingard is on record as saying that Stevens’ physical change serves a thematic purpose; David functions as the femme fatale to Maika Monroe’s noir detective, trading shadowy shades of black and white for the neon-lit house parties and Halloween mazes which offer the film its visual flair. The scene where David emerges from the bathroom shirtless – in a cloud of steam with a towel wrapped around his waist – is perhaps the most significant of its kind. It’s certainly a scene of eye candy first and foremost, but as David manoeuvres around Anna in the tight hallway of the modest Peterson house, Anna’s eyes stay trained on his slick six-pack, and there is a classic tension between physical attraction and trustworthiness.

The decision to cast Dan Stevens in such a role is what facilitates this tension; even American audiences recognize the actor and associate his signature baby blues with kindness and warmth; we are initially drawn in by his familiarity. It’s the same quality of charm which David uses to first disarm the Peterson family, and then to infiltrate their home. We know Dan Stevens; we like Dan Stevens. We are as surprised as anyone when he turns violent, deftly navigating action sequences with an athleticism we haven’t seen from him before. Stevens’ transformation is more than simply physical; to accurately embrace a true Southern accent, he steers away from stereotypes and lowers his register to a softer, deeper drawl, which complements his increasingly sinister nature. The Guest is effective in the way it lays bare the shiny, attractive facade of the American war machine, which belies something more cruel and violent; as ambitious as such a project might be, it is Stevens’ performances which elevates the material.

Admittedly, Stevens’ appearance as the Prince in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast is something of an outlier in his filmography. From his Downton Abbey departure onward, Stevens’ career had been punctuated by the likes of Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, Gareth Evans’ Apostle, and Maria Shrader’s I’m Your Man; assured, ambitious auteur films. His casting perhaps served to capitalize on his popularity at the time, following a well-received turn in Noah Hawley’s eclectic FX show Legion; however, the role showcased the rare dualism which Stevens has possessed throughout his career, an ability to play both the beautiful prince and the tortured beast. If nothing else, Stevens manages to push through the film’s nightmarish CGI and offer something which resembles a grounded performance at the center of the film, where otherwise stale performances pervade familiar story beats.

This is the same dualism which Stevens wields as Dr. Koenig in Cuckoo, who welcomes new families to the idyllic Resort Alpschatten in the Bavarian alps. While he comes across as likable to parents and children, it is only the teenage daughter Gretchen, played by Hunter Schafer, who seems suspicious of such effusive amiability. As the film descends into increasing chaos, alternating layers of Dr. Koenig’s courtesy and cruelty are slowly revealed; a memorable scene briefly showcased in the trailer shows Gretchen recovering from a car accident, with Dr. Koenig visiting her in the hospital under the pretense of concern. Despite Gretchen’s eye nearly swollen shut, her head wrapped in a bandage, her arm in a sling, he lowers his voice to nearly a whisper as he tells her, “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt even more,” while inching forward toward her hospital bed.

Stevens has emphasized in a recent interview with Vanity Fair that, “We can still shoot this incredibly…difficult scene, but everybody’s still friends at the end of the day and nobody needs to have months of therapy afterwards.” If this year has proven anything about Dan Stevens, it is that he possesses the generosity of a team player; often, his best work shines the brightest in an ensemble of equally dedicated performers.

Cate Blanchett’s role in Eli Roth’s video game adaptation Borderlands may seem like something of an outlier to followers of her work. Her character Lilith, an intergalactic gunslinger with bright red hair and a menacing expression, may not be the type of role people associate with the two-time Oscar winner. One of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation, films like Elizabeth, Carol and Tár have earned her the reputation of a prestige actress known for complex character studies that draw critical acclaim.

However, there is a trend in her career that tends toward roguish, misfit roles, particularly in big-budget productions. “The crazy asks are usually the things I gravitate towards; the things I could never conceive of,” Blanchett revealed in an interview promoting Borderlands. “I think there also may have been a little COVID madness — I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely. My husband said, ‘This film could save your life.’” The pull of the obscure is something that has remained consistent in her filmography, for better and worse.

Whereas pandemic isolation inspired her to take on Lilith, one of Blanchett’s most famous Hollywood roles was inspired by disruption. She played Hela, the Goddess of Death, in Taika Waititi’s Thor Ragnarok, the estranged sister of Thor and Loki who returns from imprisonment following the death of their father Odin. Hela was the first female villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with an entrance that shattered the status quo as she destroyed Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. Waititi’s film was a tonal shift for Thor, moving from brooding drama to something more colourful and comedic. Blanchett fit in perfectly, making Hela a grandstanding antagonist with a piercing stare, imposing headdress, and many a memorable line.

“I’m not a queen or a monster. I’m the Goddess of Death,” she says gleefully as she chokes Chris Hemsworth’s mighty hero in the film’s finale. It’s this duality that makes Hela one of the truly great Marvel villains, in that there is a human objective rather than some mystical MacGuffin, and a relatable motivation. She has a case for revenge having been wronged by their father, even if she chooses a callous path to achieve it. A mixture of danger, camp, and godly presence, she made her mark on the world’s biggest franchise.

The same interesting depth is visible in Blanchett’s foray into the world of Disney princesses – Kenneth Branagh’s live-action remake of Cinderella. The film itself plays it reasonably safe with the fairytale, resisting the twists in the formula that had come with films like Frozen two years previously. However, Blanchett drew on classic and modern influences to make her character, Lady Tremaine, more than an ‘Evil Stepmother’. The 1950 Disney cartoon portrayed Tremaine as severe and matronly, with her disdain for Cinderella coming from a place of sheer malevolence. Blanchett’s version, partly inspired by Joan Crawford, overflows with style and grace. She is initially warm toward Ella (Lily James), until her own pain turns her against her step-daughter.

In a scene where Ella finds out that her father – Lady Tremaine’s husband – has died, the messenger says in her earshot that his last words were for Ella and his first wife. Grief and the knowledge that she was never loved as much as her husband’s first family drive her to cruelty. Like Hela, there is some intelligence behind the role that introduces more motive, adding style and substance to a character that in the past had been wicked for the sake of it. Even in the most conventional of fairytales, Blanchett found something new to work with.

Moving away from capes and glass slippers, Blanchett was a key figure in the ensemble spin-off Ocean’s 8. Working with a star cast that included everyone from Sarah Paulson to Rihanna, Blanchett distinguished her character, Lou, from the group. Dressed in an array of fashionable suits, the actor disclosed that she gave Lou “quite a lot of masculine energy”, infusing the right-hand woman of leader Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) with a casual confidence and playful flirtatiousness. She’s introduced sitting on top of a crate of alcohol she’s watering down, reading a magazine about motorbikes, and seems to be able to procure anything and everything Debbie asks for.

Of the group, Lou is the most enigmatic, never revealing her hand and sharing a chemistry with her partner that has led to many internet fan theories that the characters were an item (something Blanchett has denied). Regardless of context, Lou is an outlaw both in occupation and spirit. In a film where the target is The Met Gala, it would have been tempting to make the character as classically glamorous as the actress who plays her. However, Lou remains an outsider, someone who seems at home both in the shadows of criminality and on the red carpets of Manhattan.

Of course, not every venture into blockbuster territory is a success. 2008’s Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull was derided by fans, who took issue with the outlandish plot twists and cartoonish characters, one of whom was Dr Irina Spalko, played by Blanchett. A mixture of Raiders of The Lost Ark’s Arnold Toht and famous Bond villain Rosa Klebb, her Ukrainian accent, severe bob and large performance were not the worst aspects of the film, but perhaps symptomatic of its failings. A psychic Soviet agent with an obsession with the titular artefact, the lack of subtlety within the story meant Spalko became cartoonish against Blanchett’s better instincts. After all, is there a credible way to fence on top of two jeeps driving through a jungle?

Blanchett will be hoping for more success with Borderlands, but regardless of the outcome, these roles illustrate an artist who is willing to take risks on the biggest stage. As blockbusters become criticised for becoming increasingly homogenous, Cate Blanchett’s name on the poster of the latest big-budget adventure is hopefully a sign that you’ll be seeing something at least a little bit different.

At the end of Paul Brickman’s Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen turns the tables on Rebecca De Mornay’s Lana, the sex worker he’s fallen in love with despite – or because of – the fact that she’s just conned him into turning his affluent parents’ home into a brothel. Where once Lana had asked Joel to pay her, he now insists she pay him. They joke about pricing as Joel’s voiceover plays us out. “My name is Joel Goodsen,” he reminds, stressing the ‘good son’ pun. “I deal in human fulfilment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life, huh, kid?” Bolstered by Cruise’s wry delivery, the message here is clear: this is a kid who has learned, above all, how to sell himself.

If the movie – at base a screwy satire of Reaganomics – ultimately needles this lesson, its lead pricks with a boyish exuberance irreducible to the bleak machinations of social reproduction. (Joel’s sales pitch is the Hollywood ending; Brickman’s more downbeat original sees the two teens parting forever, Lana back to her pimp, Joel to Princeton.) That kinetic zeal, along with photography by The Beguiled’s Bruce Surtees and original synth score by Tangerine Dream, limns the picture. You can hardly fault Cruise, then 20 and still fresh-faced from a brief stint in seminary school, for being enthusiastic about a role that takes an ambitious virgin and makes him over into a professional crowd-pleaser. After all, how else do you become a movie star?

After Risky Business, which enters the Criterion collection this month (the first of Cruise’s films to do so), Cruise was the movie star. By “movie star” I mean “not an actor” – or rather, an actor only when it suits, as a particular constellation he might form at will. But generally, the celebrity of Cruise eclipses any technical skill; the brand and commodity of him overwhelms. In part, this means there’s a remarkable consistency across his entire body of work. Much of what audiences would come to expect from a “Tom Cruise performance” is there already in his breakout role: the gusto that can verge on derangement, the live-wire physicality, the fixated commitment to some form of workaholism or hyper-competence. All these aspects have made Cruise tremendously fun to watch over the past four decades. But what makes him interesting – Criterion release, academic monograph, talking about Edge of Tomorrow after a couple of beers interesting – is his long-standing commitment to performances that interrogate, and sometimes outright undermine, the very same things that make him a star.

This begins as early as Risky Business. Both Cruise and Joel, ultimately, deal in human fulfilment. (Joel made eight thousand in one night? Cruise’s best box office weekend netted him nearly $100 million.) The film they’re in wonders whether that’s ever a good thing. Scenes as famously star-making as the “Old Time Rock and Roll” pantomime are nonetheless troubled by the exploitable space between an ingenue’s public performance and private child’s play. Cruise’s nascent affinity for couches renders Joel’s pantsless dance party more adorable than titillating, but a shot through the windows of his parents’ house still casts our attention as some shameless voyeurism. Even as it made him a mega-star, Risky Business raised an eyebrow at the appeal of the MTV-era matinee idols Cruise would come to define.

For the rest of the 1980s, Hollywood’s biggest earner fleshed out his golden boy persona in Americana mainstays like All The Right Moves and Top Gun. For Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Cruise translated Joel Goodsen’s naivety into a callow self-assurance that, when set against the shimmering speed of the F-14 Tomcat, became a glamorous symbol of insouciant American warmongering. Or so said Oliver Stone, with whom Cruise made his last movie of the decade, the anti-war drama Born on the Fourth of July.

Cruise was an unlikely choice for the role of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet who became an outspoken decrier of U.S. interventionism after being paralyzed overseas. Critics saw the actor’s physical transformation from clean-cut cadet into shaggy resistor as a major, though welcome, departure. But the performance’s wallop is in the familiarity of Maverick’s insolent face on a furious, frangible body. When, briefly cleaned up in Kovic’s crisp Marine blues, Cruise flinches at an Independence Day parade’s every firecracker, the wince registers not as a retreat from his earlier work, but a reflection on it.

There are shades of this reflexivity in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, the fairytale of a slick sell-out cured by Cameron Crowe’s hippie speedball style blend of manic sincerity. But Cruise’s penchant for roles troubled by “Tom Cruise” truly peaked in 1999, when he gave himself over to Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson for back-to-back vivisections. Both Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Anderson’s magnificent Magnolia cut through the layers of Cruise’s star persona to expose the nervier things that lie beneath it. As chauvinist pick-up artist Frank TJ Mackey and the solipsistic Dr. Bill Hartford, Cruise’s trademark cockiness becomes a hollow front for desperate insecurity. His masculinity hinges on a sequence of lies. His authority evaporates in rooms full of strangers who look to him for explanations only to get backflips, or bad orgy etiquette, in reply.

Then, in the mid-2000s, Cruise began running, literally, in the opposite direction. Abruptly an action star, and only a bit less abruptly a zealous PR nightmare, he seemed more interested in armoring his mythos than further exploring it. Still, for all their navel-gazing glory, a deep vein of anxiety runs through Top Gun: Maverick and the latest entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The extreme stunts for which Cruise has now become notorious trade on the dual idea that he is both the only one who can execute them and that, someday sooner than we’d like, he won’t be able to. It’s a vulnerability reaching back to his Risky Business days that is made most visible when Tom Cruise hurls his body off a cliff in IMAX 3-D. If there’s only one star like him, the long arc of his uniquely self-aware career seems to ask, does it mean he’s infallible or always already falling?

We hear Glen Powell before we see him in Richard Linklater’s 2016 breezy, sun-soaked college hangout movie Everybody Wants Some!!, and over the years that cocky Texan inflection has become immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the onscreen persona he’s cultivated since. In his first major role, Powell thrums with unrestrained energy as college upperclassman Walt Finnegan, talking a mile a minute, infusing otherwise mundane lines with the theatricality of a British accent at random, loose-limbed on the dancefloor. Assured and smooth-talking, he doesn’t take himself too seriously, but he can sell you on anything, from a scoop of whipped cream (“It’s about the way the ingredients make you feel,” he coos) to a date (Walt’s patented routine for picking up women at clubs involves talking about his “average dick” so they aren’t intimidated. It shouldn’t work, but does). In Hit Man, Powell’s fourth collaboration with Linklater, his character – mild-mannered professor Gary Johnson – parlays that same irrepressible confidence and charm into selling himself. Or at least a version of him that doesn’t really exist at first.

The actor employs charisma like a concealed weapon, flipping between milquetoast philosophy and psychology professor and persuasive fake contract killer with alarming ease. Undercover, his voice gains an authoritative edge, his body language is freer, and his demeanour is more assertive. Gary Johnson recognises that he can be anybody he wants and, as the various facets of his put-on personality bleed into his original one, the transformation takes on another layer: here is an actor becoming a full-fledged movie star.

Powell’s onscreen confidence is often inextricable from his All-American appearance – in several of his movies, characters draw attention to just how good-looking he is, with his character in 2012’s Stuck in Love simply identified as ‘Good Looking Frat Guy’ – and often bolstered by the writing making him one of the smartest people in the room. Each of his characters has always possessed a degree of unflappability, which comes in handy given his penchant for portraying figures of American authority – sergeants, colonels, astronauts, pilots, and NASA officials.

The actor first brought his good-natured amiability to the pressures of the space race in Hidden Figures (2016). “We don’t have time to be scared,” says his character – Marine Corps pilot John Glenn – at a press conference, mirroring Walt’s zen “Pressure is a choice” outlook from Everybody Wants Some!! Powell plays John as supremely easy-going, such that when we finally see him sweat upon his fraught re-entry to Earth, the sense of danger is immediately intensified. Though he would go on to play similarly wholesome all-American heroes, Sand Castle (2017) instead channels the actor’s confidence into crude machismo and a streak of right-wing cruelty. Deployed to rural Iraq, the caged-animal energy of his Sergeant Chutsky is in stark contrast to Nicholas Hoult’s withdrawn fright as an army reservist. With a cheeky insouciance that can only come from having seen it all before, his dimpled grin is as near-permanent a fixture in the desert landscape as gunfire and explosions – for him, war is fun.

Powell’s warm smile stays put even in the face of his co-pilot’s (Jonathan Majors) initial stony reserve in Devotion (2022), based on the true story of Jesse Brown, the US Navy’s first Black aviator. As Lieutenant Tom Hudner, the actor borrows the bomber jacket, sunglasses and cocky strut of his more well-known Top Gun: Maverick (2022) role, but – in contrast to the unabashed optimistic Americana of Joseph Kosinski’s film – the nature of war comes with some sobering, sad realisations, chipping at his poise. By the end, grief sits heavy on Hudner’s shoulders. He still cracks a smile, but Powell doesn’t let it reach his eyes.

Contrast that with Top Gun: Maverick, in which Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin’s confidence is dialled up to arrogant smugness; he’s an outsized ego that stands out even in a sea of them. In his needling of Rooster (Miles Teller), Hangman employs the measured, grating tones of someone who knows exactly where to twist the knife. He punctuates his sentences with smirking nods for further obnoxiousness. In interviews, even Powell referred to Hangman as “dick garnish” and “Navy Draco Malfoy”. In the hands of a lesser actor, the lieutenant would be easy to hate, but exuding coolth and suaveness, alternating between good-natured ribbing and real malice, Powell makes him an onscreen presence compellingly easy to watch. When Maverick (Tom Cruise) proposes a particularly insane manoeuvre and the camera pans to looks of disbelief on the other students’ faces, something novel flickers across Hangman’s: pure relish. And when he glides in to save the day when all hope seems lost, his cockiness is entirely justified.

Part of another franchise in which older characters ruminate on passing on the baton to a younger generation, Powell is the picture of confidence right from his Expendables 3 (2014) introductory scene – scaling a cliff Tom Cruise Mission Impossible-style, then one-upping him by paragliding off it. Of course his character Thorn is also an expert drone pilot. And a skilled hacker. His toothpick-chewing swagger elevates the otherwise clichéd characterisation and once again, it’s his calm know-how that saves the team. By the time Powell reunites with Linklater on their third collaboration, Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (2022), he’s exactly the assured, reliable voice you need in your ear on a solo mission to the moon. It’s his NASA official who must sell the movie’s ludicrous premise – that the organisation accidentally built the lunar module too small and must find a child to pilot it – but he does it with such unassailable sass, it’s hard to argue.

One of Powell’s best roles subverts his unshakeable confidence by presenting it as straight-up delusion. In the slasher comedy series Scream Queens, his ridiculously named Chad Radwell is a riff on the entitled frat boy. This time, his smile captures a ‘no thoughts head empty’ bliss. He’s a himbo, delivering lines that clearly convey his stupidity with an exaggerated conviction in his intelligence. Powell’s comedic timing is impeccable, whether he’s responding to an insulting question about where he got his mommy issues from with a straight-faced, earnest “you know…probably my mom?” to his big plan to tackle the serial killer on campus – get “roided up” and roam around with a baseball bat.

Powell’s confident charisma is what makes him the ideal romantic lead – think of him swooping in like a knight in shining armour to rescue Sydney Sweeney’s damsel in distress at a coffee shop in Anyone But You (2023), pretending to be her husband without missing a beat. This film and Set It Up (2018), however, are Glen Powell romcoms that play with his confidence in smart ways, framing vulnerability as a far more interesting trait.
Powell’s Ben is so self-assured in Anyone But You that the script has to write weaknesses into his character, like a fear of flying, or being unable to swim. The film, however, eventually reveals that all that cocky posturing is a front – Ben’s snarky sniping at Bea (Sweeney) is a cover for his hurt at her leaving him. It’s only at the end that his confidence finally gives way to raw vulnerability, a crucial rom-com hero bit of character development.

As Charlie Young in Set It Up, the actor plays against type as a browbeaten assistant, shrunken inwards by his toxic workplace. There’s a whiff of desperation in how he approaches his relationship with his model girlfriend (Joan Smalls) who already has one foot out the door. He’s only confident when the power dynamic is in his favour, taking out his job frustrations by berating an intern or gleefully sniping at another assistant. As he meets Harper Moore (Zoey Deutch) and becomes more carefree, snark gradually becomes banter. And in the movie’s best scene – in which the two share a pizza – he visibly gulps at the realisation that he might be falling in love, a reflexively unguarded reaction before he slowly regains his composure.

“It’s not that I need people to root for you, but I need them to love watching you,” is what Cruise told Powell about approaching Hangman as they were prepping for Top Gun: Maverick. But it seems that the actor hardly needed the pep talk. Whether he’s leaning into his innate confidence – as in his next role as the charismatic storm-chasing streamer Tyler Owens in Twisters – or gently subverting it onscreen, it’s safe to say that Powell has long figured out how to have his cake and sell it to you too.

Guy Ritchie’s debut feature, 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, opens not with the former child star (Dexter Fletcher), nor with the stunt-cast footballer-turned-actor (Vinnie Jones), nor with the central protagonist of the film (Nick Moran). Instead, the first scene is given to the French Connection model with no prior acting experience, hawking stolen goods to street punters like you’d see down any disreputable London side street in the mid-90s.

This was our introduction to Jason Statham, rattling off a charmingly confident crowd-working monologue like it was second nature as small-time hustler Bacon. The cheeky glint in his eye, ruggedly handsome looks, gentle razzing of the crowd gathered, and relaxed control of the situation project an ideal of masculine coolness without being unapproachable. Even when events spiral out of control – whether it’s being presented with a gaudy cocktail or stumbling upon a bloody pile of corpses – both Bacon the character and Statham the actor have just the right disdainful quip on hand that’s almost nonchalant in its delivery.

25 years on from that first appearance, it’s fair to say that not a whole lot has changed. Jason Statham has had a lengthy acting career mostly characterised by playing slight variations on that persona. Particularly from the mid-00s to the mid-10s, a Statham vehicle was one of dependability, a 21st-century take on the kind of schlocky action B-movie which brings a comforting certainty to it.

Whilst Lock Stock… positioned him as a London geezer, it was 2002’s The Transporter directed by Corey Yuen which solidified the Statham persona for a worldwide stage: roguish ex-military/policeman working in the criminal underworld, who nonetheless has a heart of gold so long as the right insanely beautiful woman crosses his path, capable of decimating a room full of goons and driving the bejeezus out of a car in a pinch. That sentence applies to Frank Martin (the titular Transporter) but also describes to varying degrees Jensen Ames in 2008’s Death Race, Arthur Bishop in 2010’s The Mechanic, and Lee Christmas in The Expendables franchise.

These are movies which don’t ask a lot of Statham dramatically. Stoic swagger, relaxed confidence, and making even the lamest quips sound vaguely cool. Physically, they rely on his ability to convincingly pull off tight action setpieces which add to both the character and star’s mythos, a task his childhood practising martial arts made him adept at. In that first Transporter, Statham acquits himself decently with the barebones Luc Besson co-written screenplay (though he drowns in Besson’s typically awful efforts at convincing romance), but he’s made as a Movie Star in the third act when Yuen’s Hong Kong action takes over. The oil fight where Frank battles a room full of goons whilst sliding about shirtless and covered in oil is maybe the definitive Statham action scene. Impressive in its construction, equal parts cool and silly, and performed with total commitment by its star.

Even as the hits started to dry up, that archetypal Statham persona lived on. 2012’s Safe starts with Statham being atypically vulnerable, his Luke Wright giving into despair rather than resolved to vengeance once his wife is murdered by Russian mobsters. But one subway fight later, he’s back to being the cool, confident, single-minded Statham we know, playing all sides effortlessly to come out on top. 2018’s The Meg was sold off the possibility of seeing Jason Statham punch a giant shark in the face (which he indeed does). Even Ritchie succumbed to the Statham persona when the pair, 16 years after last working together on Revolver, reunited for 2021’s Wrath of Man, a convoluted crime thriller where Statham was a revenge-fuelled mob boss…playing all sides effortlessly to come out on top.

Still, it’s a persona which has served him well and made the few times where a role has played with that type all the more notable. His debut in the Fast & Furious franchise, 2015’s Furious 7, cast him in the rare villain role of Deckard Shaw; an implacable force of chaos against Dominic Toretto’s extended Family who always turns up at the worst possible moment.  Later entries would lighten Shaw up, give him a redemption arc, and an invitation to the family cookout.

The starkest break from type undoubtedly comes from Paul Feig’s 2015 spoof, Spy, as CIA Agent Rick Ford. A pompous egotist whose list of cartoonish cock-ups – culminating in knocking himself out with his own coat during a dramatic finale entrance – is only eclipsed by his unbelievable boasts – including successfully impersonating Obama in Congress. Statham displays a real understanding of comedic timing, the knowledge of when to turn up his intensity to match the macho nonsense spewing from Ford’s mouth, and a selfless willingness to look a total fool that causes him to arguably steal the entire movie.

All of which were also on display in the Crank duology. Bacon introduced Statham to the world, Frank Martin defined the template for Statham going forward, but Chev Chelios may be the iconic Jason Statham role. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s gleefully offensive action-comedies play up and undermine the Statham persona at every turn. Chelios is a much-feared Los Angeles hitman capable of staving off the fast-acting poison injected into his bloodstream from instantly killing him by sheer force of adrenaline-based will, can bring the city’s underworld to its knees within just a few hours, and survives multiple ludicrous Looney Tunes-esque deaths.

He’s also forced to utterly debase himself in order to stay alive: Chelios has sex with his girlfriend during a horserace in front of a stadium of spectators; sprints down city streets clad in only a wafting hospital gown; attaches a shock collar to his neck and barks like a dog, and clamps his nipples to a car battery. Crank and its sequel Crank: High Voltage overload on so much testosterone that they manage to simultaneously function as both cool, brainless macho action movies and absurdist parodies of brainless macho action movies.

This is largely because Statham brings the same commitment he would to a more straight-laced role. He’s naturally charming, which keeps Chelios entertaining despite the many awful things the man does in both movies. He’s confident and assertive, which makes the many implausible feats Chelios pulls off fully believable, and the times when he gets rattled even funnier. Statham can sell absurd lines with a nonchalance that’s entertaining and egoless, embracing the questionable quality of whatever script he’s performing.

Across his quarter-century career, Statham has come in for criticism about his limited range and role choices. But there’s a certain dependability you get from a Jason Statham role, and he possesses a refreshing understanding of his capabilities as an actor. These qualities make those instances where a role of his unexpectedly deviates all the more exciting.

28 Days Later, the apocalyptic zombie film which gave Cillian Murphy his breakout role, opens and closes with two near-identical scenes. Both moments find Jim, played by Murphy, scared, injured and confused, the camera pressed hard to his face as he tries to decipher the situation in which he finds himself. These bookends, while framed in a similar fashion, present two very different people; the Jim blissfully unaware of the zombie apocalypse gripping his world, and the Jim who’s just pressed a man’s eyeballs out with his thumbs to save his only friends and companions. A man who did what had to be done.

Throughout his career, the latter is the Murphy we have become familiar with. In almost every role he takes on, Murphy has an inherent control over his environment. Whether he is a mob boss, Irish revolutionary, Gotham’s least Hippocratic psychiatrist, or a world-changing nuclear physicist, he is preternaturally competent, a stoic statue of proficiency, a man who does what’s needed. Jim isn’t any of those things when we first meet him, but he learns fast.

As we enter a summer in which Murphy is set to headline one of the biggest movies of the year, it is important to remember how anonymous he was when he was cast in Danny Boyle’s zombie thriller. Up to that point, the 26-year-old Cork-born actor had mostly bounced around British and Irish theater, before starring in Disco Pigs – a strange, dark little movie adapted from the Edna Walsh play he had also performed in. That said, it’s not hard to understand what Boyle and subsequent directors saw in the young actor. As if his piercing blue eyes and Roman bust of a face weren’t enough, Murphy has the kind of quiet, understated power that allows for both projection and unknowability.

“Cillian has this extraordinary empathetic ability to carry an audience into a thought process. He projects an intelligence that allows the audience to feel that they understand the character and see layers of meaning,” said Christopher Nolan to Rolling Stone earlier this year. It’s something that Nolan has exploited in different ways throughout their many collaborations. Hot off the success of 28 Days Later, Nolan brought Murphy in to test for the lead role in his new Batman trilogy – a role that would eventually go to Christian Bale. Regardless, Nolan wanted Murphy involved, instead casting him as one of Bale’s earliest nemeses, Dr. Jonathan Crane, or Scarecrow, a psychiatrist unafraid to explore unconventional modes of diagnosis and treatment. There’s something to be said about the fact that even as a comic book villain – a notoriously insecure profession – Murphy’s Scarecrow remains a thread that runs through the Nolan Batman trilogy, an adaptable, steady hand in a world of Jokers.

It’s a role Murphy takes on again and again throughout his career, that of the consummate professional, even as circumstances around him continue to heighten. A year after the release of Batman Begins, Murphy appeared in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a story set a bit closer to home than Gotham City. In it, he plays Damien O’Donovan, a fictional Irish Republican Army soldier fighting for Irish independence in the 1920s. It’s a dense, historically-minded film in which the chaos and violence of the time is placed at the fore, and individual character, at times, is given short shrift.

Murphy’s O’Donovan is the exception – a young man believable as both the bookish, London-bound doctor and the ruthless military leader. It’s his moral anguish, and constant refusal to let it stand in the way of his goals, that give the film momentum and pathos even in the face of its moments of history book density.

Much of what he does in The Wind That Shakes The Barley can be seen as the blueprint for what, to this point, is perhaps Murphy’s most notable role. Thomas Shelby, the leader of the titular criminal enterprise at the center of Peaky Blinders, is defined by both internalized anguish and ruthless acumen. Like many a television anti-hero before and after, Shelby is haunted, by both the trauma he faced during the First World War and the violent lengths he must go to keep his family atop the pecking order in 1920s Birmingham. For much of the series, this trauma is beneath the surface, an anger that simmers from the corners of those wide eyes but never makes its way to the rest of the face. When it does escape that stoic stare, it is violent and terrifying, a drastic inversion of the control he so easily displays.

It’s this line of performance that makes his broken and shell-shocked turn in 2017’s Dunkirk all the more affecting. Nolan’s characteristic manipulation of time has us meet Murphy’s unnamed “shivering soldier” only after the events that have led him to near catatonia. When Mark Rylance’s civilian sailor and his son find Murphy he looks the part of a competent officer, one who should be raring for a fight, but instead his all frayed nerves, pure trauma with none of the facade that Murphy typically wears so well.

This brings us back to 28 Days Later. When we meet Jim he could not be more vulnerable. Stark naked, alone and afraid, he awakens unaware of the virus that has revaged the United Kingdom, and survives only thanks to a few straggling survivors, led by Naomie Harris’s headstrong and resourceful chemist Selena. Today, it’s not hard to picture Murphy as the knowing leader ushering the powerless through apocalyptic terror, but here he is all but ineffectual, a bicycle messenger who lost his whole family and nearly everyone he has ever met. “Help Selena! Wait, Selena!” yells Jim as he hobbles up the stairs away from the infected whose red eyes and snarled teeth close in on him. As the audience surrogate, Murphy spends much of 28 Days Later learning and adapting as best he can, but he is almost always one step behind the action, never in control.

That is, until the film’s climax, when his naivety and relative peacefulness is wrenched away by twisted humanity that threatens his only remaining companions. Caked in blood and straddling a would-be rapist, Jim is no longer wide-eyed, but hardened and callous. It’s in these final moments where we meet the Murphy who has graced our screens ever since: a man whose hope is always tempered by anguish, but who can be rellied upon to do what has to be done all the same.