Jay Baruchel

Jay Baruchel has been working in Canadian television since he was a child, on Popular Mechanics for Kids and Are You Afraid of the Dark, and he was still a teenager when he landed Steven Karp on Undeclared. Almost Famous and then Danger Barch in Million Dollar Baby put him in serious American films before he was twenty-three.

The instrument is unusual: a thin, reedy, slightly anxious voice and a physical presence that reads as permanently apologetic. Comedy directors used it as an engine for a decade, from Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder through She's Out of My League and This Is the End, where he plays a version of himself who is too Canadian and too decent for Los Angeles. It works because he never asks for sympathy; the nervousness is just the weather he lives in.

Then How to Train Your Dragon turned that same quality into something genuinely moving. Hiccup, across three features and a stack of shorts and series from 2010 to 2019, is one of the best animated leads of the century, and Baruchel plays him as a clever boy whose kindness costs him standing rather than as a plucky hero. Films he has starred in have grossed over 1.28 billion dollars worldwide.

The surprise is what he does behind the camera. He directed Goon: Last of the Enforcers and the horror film Random Acts of Violence, both considerably harsher and bleaker than anything his on-screen persona would suggest, which is the most interesting fact about him.