Ian Whyte
Ian Whyte is an actor, born 1971.
Whyte played professional basketball before anyone put him in a creature suit, and the second career runs entirely on the first. He is tall enough that a costume department can build something inhuman around him and sell the scale without a single visual effect, which is a rarer commodity than it sounds.
The Alien vs. Predator films made him the house Predator, first as Scar in the 2004 crossover and then again in the 2007 sequel, so a good share of what audiences read as the creature's posture and walk is his. Prometheus used the same asset differently. As the Last Engineer he wears no rubber head, and the menace comes from watching a very large humanoid move calmly. In between he has been the Devil's Reaper in Solomon Kane, a beast, a skinwalker, Lucifer, a plague doctor, a lead wolf, and the mound dweller in The Northman. He also cycled through several different characters on Game of Thrones, which is the closest thing he has to a long-running credit.
The recent turn is the interesting one. On Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire he is credited as the puppeteer for Garraka rather than as the body inside it, which is a promotion of a kind: from being the frame a monster gets built on to operating one.
Movies (13)
TV (2)
Where to start with Ian Whyte
Two scenes of Prometheus explain the whole career. His Engineer barely does anything, never explains himself, and is still the most physically alarming thing in the film, which is the entire job description and the reason to start there.
For the creature work proper, AVP: Alien vs. Predator is the better of his two Predator films and the one where the movement has room to read. The Northman gives him a few minutes in a burial mound that are stranger and more committed than anything in the franchise pictures. Solomon Kane and The Reckoning are lower-budget horror where he plays outright devils, and both are worth it only if you like that register. The Irregulars is the television version of the same trick, a plague doctor built around his silhouette, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire shows the next stage of the career, with him working the puppet instead of wearing it.