Brian Thompson

The jaw got him the job, and then he made a forty-year career out of what he did with it. Thompson's first credit was a punk in The Terminator in 1984, and two years later he was the Night Slasher in Cobra, which set the terms for everything that followed: he is the thing that keeps walking towards you.

His first named role was Nicholas Remy on Werewolf, during Fox's inaugural year of broadcasting in 1987. From there the genre work never stopped. He played several characters across the Star Trek franchise, most memorably the Klingon Lieutenant Klag, who informs Commander Riker that gagh is always best served live, and later Admiral Valdore on Enterprise. He was Shao Kahn in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Brok in DragonHeart, Hercules in a television Jason and the Argonauts, Kabal in Doctor Mordrid, and Eddie Fiori on Kindred: The Embraced.

The role worth the argument is the recurring Alien Bounty Hunter on The X-Files. It is a part with almost no dialogue and no explanation, and Thompson understood that the less it emoted, the more frightening it became. Very few actors can hold a scene by doing nothing; that is a real skill and it is what he was hired for.

In 2014 he produced, wrote and starred in a low-budget genre parody of his own. Recent credits include a captain on 9-1-1 and a murderer in The Tragedy of Macbeth.