David Oyelowo

David Oyelowo built a career in British television before Hollywood noticed him, most visibly as the MI5 officer Danny Hunter in the early seasons of Spooks. Moving to America meant starting over in supporting parts, and for three or four years he was the reliable presence at the edge of other people's prestige films: a lab executive in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a preacher in The Help, a Union corporal in Lincoln, a detective in Jack Reacher. The Butler in 2013 was the first of those to give him real interior life, a son whose politics pull him away from his father.

Then Selma. Playing Martin Luther King Jr. is a trap, because the voice is on tape and every viewer has it memorised, and Oyelowo's answer was to play the exhaustion instead of the oratory: a man doing arithmetic about other people's safety in the gaps between speeches. The same year he made Nightingale for HBO, a one-man film that is close to unbearable in the best sense. He got a Critics' Choice Award and a Golden Globe nomination out of that stretch, and no Oscar nomination, which caused an argument at the time.

Since then he has mostly generated his own work, producing much of it: A United Kingdom, Queen of Katwe, a directing debut on The Water Man in 2020. He works steadily in science fiction too, where his precision reads as competence under pressure, from The Cloverfield Paradox and The Midnight Sky to the sheriff in the opening stretch of Silo. He was appointed OBE in 2016.