Callum Keith Rennie

Callum Keith Rennie started late. Born in Sunderland, raised in Canada, he did not act professionally until well into adulthood, which may explain why he has never had the polish of a drama-school graduate. His breakthrough was the punk frontman in the 1996 mockumentary Hard Core Logo, followed by two seasons as Detective Stanley Kowalski on Due South. Then came Last Night in 1998, Don McKellar's quiet film about the final hours before the world ends, which won Rennie a Genie Award for best supporting actor.

What he does better than almost anyone is calm. Give him a man who is completely certain, and the certainty becomes the threatening part. Leoben Conoy on Battlestar Galactica is the clearest case: a captured Cylon who simply keeps talking, reasonably, while everyone around him panics. The same quality drives Lew Ashby on Californication, Rick Felder on The Killing, Gary Connell on The Man in the High Castle, Karl Malus in Jessica Jones, and Rayner on Star Trek: Discovery, a role he joined long after that series began.

The film work runs in parallel and is mostly other people's genre pictures: Memento, eXistenZ, Paycheck, Blade: Trinity, Warcraft, Jigsaw, and the Fifty Shades films as Ray. He is frequently the most interesting presence in something ordinary, which is a specific kind of career and not a lesser one. He has stayed based in Canada throughout, working steadily on both sides of the border for thirty years.