Pat Skipper

He wrote a book in 2015 called The Working Actor, and no title has ever described a filmography more precisely. Pat Skipper has spent his career since the late 1980s being the federal agent, the pilot, the lawyer, the judge: the man in the suit who delivers the information a scene needs and then gets out of the way so the stars can have the rest of it.

The list reads as a tour of American genre film. A hitman in Lethal Weapon 2. Part of the federal team in Predator 2. A Secret Service agent in By Dawn's Early Light. Morrissey in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a helicopter pilot in Demolition Man, Carducci in Hellraiser: Bloodline, the opposing lawyer in Erin Brockovich, Seabiscuit's vet, a judge in Blue-Eyed Butcher. On television he is best known for recurring work on The X-Files and Boston Legal, neither of which is in this catalogue.

The part with a name people remember is Mason Strode in the 2007 Halloween. Beyond that the record is the job as it actually works: a good character actor is hired to make a world feel populated, and doing it well means nobody learns your name on the way out of the cinema. Skipper has kept at it regardless, turning up as recently as Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, and then wrote the book about what that life is like, which is a more useful legacy than a highlight reel.