Don Cheadle

Don Cheadle worked a decade in supporting parts before anyone thought of him as a lead. Hamburger Hill and Colors in the late eighties, then Mouse in Devil in a Blue Dress, a performance so alive it unbalances the film in the best possible way, and the industry finally paid attention.

He is the rarest kind of screen actor, the one who is most watchable while doing the least. Cheadle plays intelligence in real time: you can see a character calculating, choosing his words, deciding to be polite. Basher in the Ocean's films is built almost entirely out of that, a technician quietly bored by everyone's theatrics. Traffic uses the same quality for grinding procedural frustration. Hotel Rwanda uses it for survival, and the Academy Award nomination it earned is really a nomination for a performance about a man being courteous to people he despises because his family depends on it.

The awards shelf is unusual: two Golden Globes, two Grammys, a Tony and eleven Primetime Emmy nominations, which puts him in the very small group nominated across all four. House of Lies gave him a lead role big enough to fill, and he directed and starred in Miles Ahead, a musician film that refuses almost every convention of the form. Against that, the last fifteen years have contained a great deal of James Rhodes, a part he inherited in Iron Man 2 and has now played in six films and a series, and which has never once required what he can actually do.