Jack Quaid

Quaid's first credited job was a bit part as a Career tribute in The Hunger Games, the sort of role that tends to find a well-connected newcomer, and the connections were real: he is the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid and the nephew of Randy Quaid. What followed was not the usual trajectory. He took a slot in the main cast of the music-industry drama Vinyl, a small role in Logan Lucky, and several years of low-budget comedies and horror pictures before anything broke.

The break was Hughie Campbell in The Boys, and it works because Quaid can play a reaction shot as an entire performance. Hughie's job in that show is to be the only ordinary person in a room full of indestructible sociopaths, and the whole satire collapses if the audience stops believing his fear and his fury in the same beat. His face does the work the writing does not have to.

Since then the casting has been much smarter about what that decency is worth. Scream used his likability as a structural device. Companion built a thriller around how long an audience will keep extending him the benefit of the doubt. Novocaine handed him a lead built on a man who cannot feel pain. In animation he plays it perfectly straight: Peter Parker in Across the Spider-Verse, and Brad Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks, an anxious junior officer who is more or less Hughie in a Starfleet uniform.