Gerard Butler

Butler studied law and came to acting in the mid nineties, taking whatever was going: a small part in Mrs Brown, a bit in Tomorrow Never Dies, the lead in Dracula 2000, Attila the Hun in a miniseries. He was a jobbing Scottish actor with a very large voice for nearly ten years, and the closest thing to a signature role in that stretch was Erik in the 2004 film of The Phantom of the Opera.

Then 300 arrived in 2007 and rewrote him as an action lead. It is worth being honest about what followed: the romantic comedies did not suit him, the disaster pictures were largely interchangeable, and a run of films like Gods of Egypt and Geostorm did real damage to how seriously he was taken.

What he is actually good at is sincerity at high volume. He commits to nonsense with a completely straight face, which is why the Has Fallen films work at all, and why Greenland, where the shouting is replaced by a father driving very fast in silence, is the best live-action thing he has made in years. The other durable answer is voice work. As Stoick across the How to Train Your Dragon films he is warm, funny and genuinely moving, and it is the performance most likely to outlast the rest of the filmography.