Neal McDonough

Neal McDonough trained in London after a fine arts degree at Syracuse, and spent his early years on stage, picking up a Dramalogue award in 1991. Hollywood's first real use for him was noticing the ice-blue eyes and the very friendly smile. Playing Lieutenant Hawk in Star Trek: First Contact satisfied a childhood ambition. Band of Brothers in 2001 was the actual break: Buck Compton, the athlete and officer who holds together longer than anyone around him and then comes apart.

The face is the career. McDonough looks like a recruitment poster, so he gets cast either as the decent soldier or, far more often, as the thing wearing that face. Damien Darhk across Arrow and the wider Arrowverse is the purest version, a supervillain played with obvious delight and always half a beat too pleased with himself. Fletcher in Minority Report, Sean Cahill in Suits, the antagonists in Justified and Tulsa King: the trick is that he never signals the menace, he simply keeps smiling while saying something appalling.

He works constantly and not always well, with a long tail of direct-to-video action films sitting beside the good television. The counter-example worth knowing is 1922, where he plays the ordinary decent farmer next door and is unsettling for precisely the opposite reason. Nearly forty years in, he is still the most efficient way for a series to tell an audience that its new character should not be trusted.