CCH Pounder

Pounder has spent a long American career being the most credible person in the room. Born in Georgetown, in what was then British Guiana, she found her way into American television first, and television knew what to do with her: Dr. Angela Hicks on ER, Claudette Wyms across the whole run of The Shield, Irene Frederic on Warehouse 13, District Attorney Tyne Patterson on Sons of Anarchy, and Dr. Loretta Wade on NCIS: New Orleans for seven years. Four Primetime Emmy nominations came out of that, for The X-Files, ER, The Shield and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

The specific skill is refusal. Pounder plays people who have already decided, and she lets you watch everyone else work that out. Claudette Wyms is the model: the one member of a corrupt squad who will not be talked around, played without a single raised voice. She uses stillness the way other actors use volume, and smart directors simply hold on her face and wait.

Her voice has had a career of its own. She has been Amanda Waller in DC animation since Justice League Unlimited, and the flat, unimpressed authority she brought there is now the default reading of the character. In film she is more often a fixed point in somebody else's genre exercise, whether that is Face/Off, Orphan or Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The exception, and the best of the film work, is Mo'at in the Avatar films, a role running since 2009 that asks her to be the spiritual authority of an invented culture without ever tipping into solemn nonsense.