Jeffrey Dean Morgan

Morgan was pushing forty, with a decade of one-episode guest parts behind him, when two roles landed close together: John Winchester on Supernatural and Denny Duquette on Grey's Anatomy. The second made him a romantic lead in a hospital gown, which is a strange route to fame and tells you what he is good at, which is making an underwritten part feel like it has a history.

The register is charm with something wrong underneath. Watchmen gave him the Comedian, a costumed adventurer who functions as the film's moral wound, and Morgan played the cynicism as exhaustion rather than swagger. The Walking Dead then handed him Negan, a villain built entirely out of performance, a man who talks for five minutes before he does anything, and he turned a show that was visibly running out of ideas back into appointment television for a few more years.

The risk with a role like that is that it eats the actor, and it largely has. Negan carried on into The Walking Dead: Dead City, while the film work stayed in the mid-budget lane: Rampage, The Unholy, The Possession, Fall. He is better than most of what he gets, and the evidence is The Salvation, a Danish-made Western in which he plays a plain, quiet man and never reaches for a single flourish. Recent work includes Joe Kessler on The Boys and Conquest in Invincible.