Elliot Page

Page started in Canadian television, including Trailer Park Boys and ReGenesis, and the film that announced him was Hard Candy in 2005, where a teenager runs the entire picture as one sustained threat against a grown man. It remains one of the most controlled breakout performances of its decade, and it is the key to everything after it.

What he does is play intelligence under pressure. He is almost always the smallest person in the frame and almost never the one being overpowered, because he holds a scene by refusing to raise his voice. Juno should have been insufferable: the dialogue is stylised to within an inch of its life, and Page delivers it as a real teenager deflecting a situation she cannot control. The film turned a Canadian indie actor into an awards-season fixture, and his nominations now include an Academy Award, three BAFTAs, two Primetime Emmys, a Golden Globe and a SAG Award.

The studio work came next. Ariadne in Inception is the audience surrogate who exists to ask the questions, which is a thankless job, and he makes her curious rather than passive. Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Days of Future Past and the seventh Hargreeves sibling across The Umbrella Academy gave him franchise reach.

He is also a producer and one of the more visible activists working in film, on LGBTQ rights and against discrimination, and he co-directed the environmental documentary There's Something in the Water. The indie spine of the career, Whip It, Into the Forest, Tallulah, My Days of Mercy, is where the acting has always been most at ease.