Emmett J. Scanlan

Emmett J. Scanlan is a Dublin actor who got famous playing a soap villain and has been usefully typecast ever since. Brendan Brady on Hollyoaks, from 2011 to 2013, was the breakthrough: a violent, closeted, magnetic character who dominated a teatime serial, and the performance was big enough that better shows came calling.

What he does is play charm as a warning sign. His men are funny and physically easy in a room until the temperature drops, and the switch is never telegraphed. Glenn Martin in The Fall and Jack O'Doherty in Gangs of London both work that way, and Shane Tessier in Fool Me Once uses the same trick on a much bigger audience. Simon Monroe in In the Flesh is the deepest thing he has done, a true believer in a small British series about people returned to the families who buried them, and Scanlan plays him as a preacher who has mistaken conviction for kindness.

The genre detours are fun and uneven: Jim Corrigan in Constantine, a bleached and roaring Lobo in Krypton, Saul in A.D. The Bible Continues. The film credits are thinner than the CV suggests, with parts like the Head Riot Guard in Guardians of the Galaxy and a character billed as Handsome Man in Argylle, though A Working Man at least gave him a character with a name worth saying, Viper. He now works steadily in the Irish and British crime pipeline, across Kin, The Tower, MobLand and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.