Marwan Kenzari

Marwan Kenzari is Dutch, born in The Hague to a Tunisian family, and spent the first stretch of his career entirely inside Dutch television and film: the police procedural Flikken Maastricht, the crime drama Penoza, the thriller Loft. Wolf, in 2013, won him a Golden Calf for best actor and effectively closed that chapter.

From 2016 the work is international and mostly in English, and the industry's first instinct was to hire him as a threat. He is a Roman officer in Ben-Hur, a henchman in The Mummy, the train conductor with something to hide in Murder on the Orient Express. Aladdin then handed him Jafar and he played it against every version of the character that came before, quiet and young and careerist rather than a cackling sorcerer, a reading that divided audiences and is more interesting than its reputation.

The Old Guard is the best use of him so far. As Joe, an immortal soldier, he gets one short speech about the person he loves, delivered from the floor of a van, that did more for that film's standing than any of its shootouts. He returned for The Old Guard 2.

Since then he has moved between studio spectacle and smaller European work, Black Adam and Ghosted on one side, The Angel and The East on the other. The register he is most reliably good in remains the calm man in a violent room.