For Fans of Gary Oldman

What separates Oldman from most actors of his generation is the refusal to rely on a persona. When Anthony Hopkins plays a villain, you see Hopkins. When Oldman played Drexl Spivey in True Romance, barely anyone recognised him. When he played George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he was still and quiet in a way that felt almost anti-cinematic, yet impossible to look away from. The discipline runs in both directions: he can be still as stone or wildly, terrifyingly unhinged, and both feel earned. His Churchill in Darkest Hour required two hours of prosthetics every morning for months, and the result won him an Oscar, but the physicality was never the point. The point was the exhaustion and resolve underneath.

Jackson Lamb, the slovenly, flatulent, brilliant head of MI5's dumping ground for failed spies in Slow Horses, is the role Oldman seemed to be circling for decades. He is repellent and magnetic in equal measure, operating by a moral code that nobody else can quite read. The Apple TV series gave him a character who can hold a scene by simply sitting very still and looking at someone. Mick Herron's novels are the source, and they are worth reading in parallel: Herron writes dialogue that crackles like live wire, and the books add interior depth that even a great adaptation compresses.

In Leon: The Professional, Oldman plays Norman Stansfield, a DEA agent so far gone into his own appetite for violence that he is practically operatic. He hums to Beethoven before murdering a family. He is the film's id made flesh, and he makes Jean Reno and a very young Natalie Portman look almost ordinary by comparison. It is the kind of villain performance that defines a career without defining the actor: he moved straight on to entirely different kinds of roles, as if Stansfield never happened.