Edward James Olmos

Edward James Olmos came to film from the stage, and his first real screen impression, El Pachuco in the 1981 film of Zoot Suit, was a part he had already made his own in the theatre. Within a few years he was in two things that would define him: Detective Gaff in Blade Runner, on screen for minutes and remembered for decades, and Lieutenant Martin Castillo on Miami Vice, which brought him an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Castillo explains the method. In a series built on colour, music and motion, Olmos played a man who did not move and barely spoke, and the whole show reorganised itself around his stillness. He does the same thing everywhere: he withholds. When he finally raises his voice, as Jaime Escalante does in Stand and Deliver, or as Admiral Adama does in a bad hour of a losing war, it lands because he has spent an hour earning it.

He directs too, and it is not a sideline. American Me, which he directed and starred in, is a bleak prison and gang chronicle with no interest in being liked. In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica he got the largest role of his career and played command as exhaustion rather than authority, which is most of why the series works as drama. Later credits run from Mayans M.C. to a Pixar musical, and he returned to Gaff in Blade Runner 2049, thirty five years on, doing more in two minutes than most of that film's cast manages in an hour.