Benjamin Bratt

Benjamin Bratt spent the early 1990s as studio muscle, second or third on the call sheet in Demolition Man, Clear and Present Danger and The River Wild. The role that actually mattered in that decade was Paco in Blood In Blood Out, a three-hour Chicano epic that flopped in cinemas and then became a permanent fixture on home video, and it is still the performance people quote back at him.

Law & Order made him a household face. Four years as Detective Rey Curtis, a Primetime Emmy nomination, and then he left while the show was at its peak, which almost nobody did in 1999. What followed was a deliberately mixed run: Traffic and Miss Congeniality in the same year, a stretch of paycheque thrillers, and steady television leads on Private Practice, Star and Poker Face.

The best late work is voice work. Ernesto de la Cruz in Coco asks him to sing, to charm, and to hold a note of showmanship that never quite convinces, and the film's whole structure depends on him getting that balance exactly right. He is similarly good as the preening El Macho in Despicable Me 2. Four ALMA awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award sit on the shelf, and the career has stayed on his own terms for over thirty years, which is a harder trick than a bigger filmography would have been.