Damon Herriman

Damon Herriman worked in Australia for decades before American television paid attention, and the role that changed it was Dewey Crowe on Justified: a career criminal with no aptitude for crime, too stupid to quit and too likeable to write out, who kept returning across the run of the show.

In 2019 he played Charles Manson twice, for two unrelated productions. One was the Netflix series Mindhunter, which is not among the credits listed here; the other was Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. The two performances are deliberately not the same. One is an inmate performing for his interviewers, the other is a man on a driveway for about ninety seconds, and Herriman recalibrates the menace completely between them.

The Australian work is where the range actually lives. Mr Inbetween puts him in the orbit of a very calm suburban hitman. Judy & Punch casts him as Punch, a drunk puppeteer with a violent streak. The Nightingale drops him into colonial Tasmania in one of the hardest films of the last decade. Perpetual Grace LTD and The Artful Dodger show how much comedy he can get out of a straight face.

He is now the most reliable character actor his country has, moving between prestige work and paycheque jobs without visibly changing effort levels: Nigel Martin-Smith in Better Man, Brucie in The Bikeriders, and a run through the Mortal Kombat films as Kabal and then Quan Chi.