Derek Mears

Derek Mears is a stuntman who became an actor by being the right shape. Born in Bakersfield in 1972 and built like a door, he spent the late nineties and early 2000s inside prosthetics and behind masks, most famously as the alien glimpsed on a roof in Signs, a few seconds of screen time that plenty of people remember better than the film's leads.

Horror gave him a name in 2009, when the Friday the 13th reboot cast him as Jason Voorhees. What he brought to it was speed. Earlier Jasons trudged; Mears played a hunter who runs, sets traps and thinks, which changed how the character reads and remains the main reason that film gets defended. He has been genre royalty since, in The Hills Have Eyes 2, Hatchet III and Dead Snow 2, and as the title character in the short lived Swamp Thing series, a suit performance that had to convey tenderness through several inches of latex.

The better turns are the ones that use his size against expectation. He is very funny as a shambling menace in I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, and Predators, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters and Alita: Battle Angel all cast him as creatures with more personality than a credit list can convey. Nearly forty screen credits in, he remains one of the few working actors whose actual job is to be physically convincing as something that is not human.