Chris O'Dowd

O'Dowd came out of Roscommon and into four series of The IT Crowd as Roy, a support technician whose entire personality is contempt for the people he is paid to help, and that is still the performance most of the internet knows him for. Moone Boy, which he created and starred in for Sky between 2012 and 2015, is the better piece of writing: a semi-autobiographical comedy about a boy in the west of Ireland and his imaginary friend, and it brought him Irish Film and Television Award nominations for acting, writing and directing at once.

The film career turned on Bridesmaids in 2011. Rhodes is a rare thing in American comedy, a romantic interest written as kind and played as slightly bored of himself, who never once presses his case, and it made O'Dowd bankable. He won an AACTA Award for The Sapphires the following year.

The more interesting discovery is that the same easy charm makes an excellent threat. Jack Brennan in Calvary and Miles Daly in Get Shorty take the register that makes him likeable and turn it sideways, so the friendliness becomes the frightening part. Between those poles he has been a Marvel comic-relief date, a postman in a hand-painted Van Gogh film, the journalist pursuing a cyclist in The Program, and an American small-town husband in The Big Door Prize. He made his Broadway debut in Of Mice and Men in 2014 with a Tony nomination, and won a Primetime Emmy for State of the Union.