Peter McRobbie

Peter McRobbie was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders and has spent his career as a New York character actor, which is a specific job: the judge, the priest, the executive, the father-in-law, the man behind the desk. He has been doing it since at least the early 1980s, when he appeared for Woody Allen in Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo, and later in Mighty Aphrodite.

The performance most people carry around is about thirty seconds long. As John Twist in Brokeback Mountain he receives a visitor at his kitchen table and refuses, in the flattest voice available to him, to give an inch. It is a lesson in withholding, and it works because McRobbie plays contempt as ordinary Sunday manners rather than as villainy. He does the same trick warmer as Father Lantom across Daredevil and The Defenders, a priest who listens without judging and gives advice that is actually useful, which is rarer on screen than it sounds.

The range inside the type is wider than it looks. He is Allen Dulles in Bridge of Spies, the congressman George Pendleton in Lincoln, a detective in 16 Blocks, and an alarming Pop Pop in The Visit, where the mild grandfatherly manner is turned against the audience. He has a long run in the Law & Order franchise as Judge Walter Bradley, which for a certain kind of viewer is the definition of a familiar face. Actors like this do not get profiles written about them. The films would be considerably worse without them.