Laurence Fishburne

Laurence Fishburne was a teenager on the set of Apocalypse Now, which is an unusual way to begin, and it took another decade before he was anything other than a face in other people's films. Rumble Fish, The Color Purple, a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel, a Cold War buddy-cop picture: the eighties were spent working. Boyz n the Hood in 1991 was the turn, and it remains the clearest statement of what he does. Furious Styles is a father lecturing his son, which ought to be unwatchable, and instead it is the most magnetic thing in the film.

The skill is authority delivered as effort. Fishburne makes speech sound like it costs him something, so exposition arrives as conviction rather than plot machinery. Morpheus explains the rules of an entire universe across three films and never once sounds like a manual. The Bowery King in the John Wick series pulls the same trick with a fraction of the screen time: three appearances by a man who exists to tell the hero something, each one landing like a threat.

Television has given him the longer roles, and the Emmys reflect it. Jack Crawford in Hannibal is the best thing he has done since the nineties, a procedural archetype rewritten as a man in slow professional freefall. The film work since has mostly been franchise furniture, a newspaper editor here, a scientist there, a narrator, all delivered with considerably more care than the writing deserves. He is one of the few actors who can make a paycheque part feel like it was worth someone's afternoon.