Matthew Modine

Matthew Modine shared the Volpi Cup at Venice for Best Actor with the rest of the ensemble of Robert Altman's Streamers in 1983, before he was twenty-five. The eighties then made him a leading man: Birdy in 1984, Vision Quest in 1985, Married to the Mob in 1988, and Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket in 1987, which is still the performance everyone means when they name him.

Joker is a good key to the whole career. The film runs on his narration and on a half-smirk that is never quite committed to anything, a man watching himself participate. Modine is at his best playing people whose self-image does not match what they are doing, and he plays it without commentary, which is why the character stays uncomfortable.

The leading-man run did not last. Cutthroat Island in 1995 was a famous financial disaster, the nineties films got smaller, and he moved into ensembles and television: Short Cuts, Memphis Belle, and Dr. Don Francis in And the Band Played On, which brought a Golden Globe nomination. He has two of those, along with a Primetime Emmy nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award for the ensemble of a drama series.

The late reinvention has been as institutional authority, usually a man convinced of his own decency. Deputy Commissioner Foley in The Dark Knight Rises, Vannevar Bush in Oppenheimer, and above all Dr. Martin Brenner across Stranger Things, where the calm paternal manner is precisely what makes the character frightening.