David Strathairn

Strathairn met John Sayles at Williams College and the resulting partnership has run for decades. He spent the 1980s and 1990s as one of American film's most dependable second leads: Silkwood, Eight Men Out, Memphis Belle, A League of Their Own, Sneakers, The Firm, Dolores Claiborne, The River Wild. Almost always the decent one. Almost never the one on the poster.

Then Good Night, and Good Luck, where he played Edward R. Murrow and collected an Oscar nomination and the Volpi Cup at Venice. Murrow suits him exactly, because the authority comes from precision rather than volume, and Strathairn can deliver long blocks of formal prose as though he is assembling them for the first time. He has since made a speciality of real people, including William Seward in Lincoln, J. Robert Oppenheimer and John Dos Passos, and won an Emmy for Temple Grandin.

The same stillness makes him unusually good at bureaucratic menace, which is the other half of the career. Noah Vosen in the Bourne films authorises terrible things in the level voice of a man clearing his inbox, and Pierce Patchett in L.A. Confidential is smooth in a way that curdles on a rewatch. The late work has been quieter and better than it needed to be: Nomadland, Nightmare Alley, and Klaes Ashford on The Expanse, where he takes a Belter accent and makes it sound lived in rather than performed.