Joaquim de Almeida

Portugal's most exported actor has spent forty years playing almost every nationality except his own, at least in English. He started in the 1982 action film The Soldier and got his first real notices in the Italian production Good Morning, Babylon in 1987, but the roles that made him internationally castable were Colonel Felix Cortez in Clear and Present Danger in 1994 and Bucho in Robert Rodriguez's Desperado a year later.

That established the type: the composed, well-dressed man who runs the operation and never touches a weapon himself. Hernan Reyes in Fast Five, reprised in Fast X, is the same silhouette with a bigger budget. So is Epifanio in Queen of the South, President Barrientos in Che: Part Two, the admiral in Behind Enemy Lines, and Ramon Salazar on the Fox thriller 24 across 2003 and 2004. He plays authority as a kind of politeness, which is why the threat registers.

The Portuguese-language work is the counterweight and it is where he gets to be something other than the heavy. Pereira Declares in 1995, the Portuguese-language comedy The Gilded Cage in 2013, the series Turn of the Tide in 2023, Fatima and The Palace. If you only know the Hollywood roles, that half of the filmography is a genuine correction.

He works constantly and takes the paycheque jobs alongside the good ones, which is a fair description of most character actors who last this long.