James Frain

James Frain read drama and film at the University of East Anglia and then trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, a conventional route to a very specific career: he has spent thirty years playing the most articulate person in the room and the least trustworthy.

The signature role is Thomas Cromwell in The Tudors, a man dismantling a church with paperwork. What Frain does with parts like that is refuse the obvious menace. He plays courtiers, lawyers and functionaries as people who are entirely reasonable right up to the moment they are not, and the effect is more unsettling than snarling would be. Warwick in The White Queen, Ferdinand Chevalier in Orphan Black and Theo Galavan in Gotham are all variations, each dressed in a different century's tailoring.

Film has used him more narrowly. He is Villefort in The Count of Monte Cristo, a Spanish envoy in Elizabeth, a corporate lieutenant in TRON: Legacy, the sort of second-tier antagonist a studio picture needs and rarely writes well. The exception in the other direction is Sarek in Star Trek: Discovery, where he had to play Spock's father as a man whose control is a moral position rather than a coldness, and got at something the franchise had mostly left implied. He was born in Leeds in 1968.