James Purefoy

Mark Antony reset him. Before HBO's Rome, Purefoy was a dependable English costume-drama lead, Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park, Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair, Nicholas Jenkins in the 1997 adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time, all decent work and none of it distinctive. Rome let him play a Roman as an appetite with a sword attached, funny and bored and dangerous in the same breath, and every good part he has had since is downstream of it.

He also has one of the odder near-misses in modern genre film: he was cast as V in V for Vendetta, was replaced during the shoot and dubbed over by Hugo Weaving, and appears in the finished film uncredited. Years later he turned up in Pennyworth, a prequel to that same world, as Gully Troy. The genre work either side of it is uneven. Solomon Kane and Ironclad are the sort of grim, mud-caked films British actors of his generation make when the money is European; Resident Evil and John Carter are studio jobs; Momentum is a paycheque.

Television has been kinder. Joe Carroll in The Following made him briefly ubiquitous as a charming academic monster, which is a trick he can do in his sleep and was asked to do for too long. Hap and Leonard is the underrated one, a loose, funny East Texas crime series where he plays a decent man with bad judgement. Altered Carbon, A Discovery of Witches, Marie Antoinette and Churchill fill out a run of rich, powerful, generally awful men. He is best when the writing lets him enjoy himself.