Noel Fisher

Noel Fisher was born in Vancouver in 1984 and started working as a teenager, which is why the early credits read like a survey of turn-of-the-century North American production: a voice on X-Men: Evolution, a bit part in Freddy Got Fingered, the school bully in Max Keeble's Big Move, a doomed teenager in Final Destination 2.

Shameless is the role. Mickey Milkovich arrived as a neighbourhood thug with almost nothing written for him and grew into one of the most complicated characters on the show, a man raised to be violent trying to work out what to do with tenderness. Fisher played that arc without ever softening the exterior, which is the hard way to do it, and the performance is why the character outlived his intended shelf life by years.

There is a second career in size and prosthetics: Michelangelo in the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, and a fifteen-hundred-year-old vampire in the final Twilight picture, both jobs where the face on screen is not really his. And a third in ensemble war pieces, where he is cast as the young private who says the wrong thing, in The Pacific and Battle: Los Angeles. The miniseries Hatfields & McCoys gave him his most unnerving part, and Castle Rock and Capone show what he does with something stranger.