Michael Massee

Michael Massee, born in Kansas City in 1952, spent three decades playing men you would cross the street to avoid. He died in 2016.

His method was underplaying. Where the scripts wanted menace, he supplied a soft voice, a slack posture and complete indifference, and the effect was far more disturbing than shouting. Funboy in The Crow is the role everyone knows and the clearest example, a dead-eyed nihilist who never once seems to be trying. Newton in the Tales from the Hood segment plays corruption as boredom. He was Andy in Lost Highway, and he turned up for barely a scene in Se7en and still registered.

Television gave him more room than film usually did. He played Ira Gaines in the first season of 24, Isaiah Haden in Revelations, Dyson Frost across FlashForward, which is probably the largest and most intricate part of his career, and Charles Hoyt in Rizzoli and Isles, where he became the series' recurring nightmare. Comic-book fans know him as the shadowy Gentleman in the two Amazing Spider-Man films, a setup thread the films never got round to paying off. Against type, he also voiced Bruce Banner in the first two Marvel Animated Features in 2006.

One fact overshadows the rest of the biography: on 31 March 1993, during production on The Crow, a prop gun Massee fired accidentally shot and killed his co-star Brandon Lee.