Christopher Judge

Judge went to the University of Oregon on a football scholarship and played in the Pacific-10 Conference before acting was ever the plan. His first decade on screen reads like a list of things nobody remembers him for: a cop in a cafe, a military policeman on a psych ward, an early guest turn on Booker. Nothing in that run predicts a twenty-five year career playing one character.

Then came Teal'c. Stargate SG-1 ran from 1997 to 2007 and asked Judge to do the thing most actors avoid: play an alien warrior who almost never changes expression, rarely raises his voice, and delivers a page of backstory with a completely straight face. What he found was rhythm. Teal'c's deadpan formality became the show's best running joke and its emotional anchor at the same time, and he kept it going through the two feature-length follow-ups and the recut pilot film.

Voice work turned out to be the second act. He was Magneto in X-Men: Evolution, which let him sound imperious rather than stoic, and in 2018 he became the second actor to play Kratos in the God of War games, continuing into the 2022 sequel. Those games are not among the credits listed here, but the performance took Best Performance at The Game Awards.

Between the landmarks sits a cheerful stretch of low-budget genre work, sharks mechanical and airborne included. He appears to treat all of it as a job worth doing properly, which is probably why he still gets asked.