Julian Richings

Richings trained in drama at the University of Exeter, worked in Britain for several years and moved to Toronto in 1984, which is the decision that shaped everything after it. The Canadian industry of that period ran on low budgets and genre, and it had an immediate use for a gaunt, hollow-eyed actor with a voice like a draught under a door. He has since appeared in more than 225 films and television series.

The casting is face first and he has built a real craft on top of it. Richings almost never plays a monster. He plays a man who has already accepted something terrible, which is considerably more unsettling. Cube (1998) opens on him and the film never regains its balance, in the best sense. In The Witch he is the governor who casts a family out in the opening scene, and the entire picture's dread starts there. Supernatural made him Death and he played it as a tired civil servant rather than a spectre.

The horror list is long enough to work as a genre history in itself, running through Wrong Turn, Saw IV, Dead Silence, Urban Legend, Survival of the Dead, Anything for Jackson and Beau Is Afraid. He also turns up where people do not expect him, in Naked Lunch and Open Range and Man of Steel, and he has kept a serious Toronto stage career going throughout, including a lead in Kat Sandler's play Mustard in 2016.

The point about Richings is that he is never a novelty. Put him in a bad film and he is still making choices.