Nathan Fillion

Nathan Fillion, born in Edmonton, Alberta in 1971, has one of the more unusual careers in American television: three lead roles, one of which was cancelled inside a season and became the most famous thing he has ever done. He was Captain Malcolm Reynolds on Firefly in 2002, a western in space that Fox aired out of order and killed after fourteen episodes, and the fan reaction was strong enough to get a feature continuation, Serenity, three years later. He then carried Castle for eight seasons and has led The Rookie since 2018, where he is also an executive producer, along with its spin-offs.

The reason he keeps landing leads is a very specific quality: he plays likeable men who are slightly worse than they think they are. Mal Reynolds is a hero who lost his war and takes it out on everyone; Richard Castle is a writer whose charm is a way of avoiding growing up; John Nolan is a rookie police officer at an age where that is faintly embarrassing. The gap between how these men see themselves and how the show sees them is where the comedy and most of the drama come from, and Fillion is unusually willing to let it show.

He has a second career almost nobody puts on a poster. He is the voice of Hal Jordan across a long run of DC animated features, and he has voiced Johnny in Monsters University and parts in Gravity Falls, Big Mouth and A Series of Unfortunate Events. And he is a fixture of James Gunn's repertory company, from the small horror film Slither through Super and on into Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad and Superman.