Ken Jeong

Ken Jeong trained and practised as a physician before comedy took over, which is the joke behind Dr. Ken, the ABC sitcom he created, wrote, produced and starred in. He came up through stand up, and his first significant screen role was a single scene as the brusque Dr. Kuni in Knocked Up.

Two roles made him. Leslie Chow across the three Hangover films is a small man playing enormous, an unhinged criminal who treats every scene as his own party, and it is a performance with no vanity whatsoever. Ben Chang on Community is the stranger achievement: a character who began as a Spanish teacher with a chip on his shoulder and mutated, season by season, into something close to a force of nature, because Jeong plays derangement with total sincerity.

That commitment is his whole method. Directors bring him in for ninety seconds of chaos and he detonates on cue, which is why he keeps turning up in other people's comedies: Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, Role Models, Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

The softer register gets far less attention. As Wye Mun Goh in Crazy Rich Asians he plays a warm, funny father with real generosity, and it suggests a whole second career he has mostly declined to pursue. He now works heavily in animation, including Penguins of Madagascar, Over the Moon, Scoob! and KPop Demon Hunters.