Timothy Olyphant

Timothy Olyphant was born in Honolulu in 1968 and arrived through the theatre, winning a Theatre World Award for his off-Broadway debut in The Monogamist in 1995 and originating David Sedaris's The Santaland Diaries the year after. Film promptly cast him as the man you should not trust: the dealer in Go, the smirking horror obsessive in Scream 2, a string of supporting heavies through Gone in Sixty Seconds and A Man Apart.

What he does better than almost anyone is stillness with a threat inside it. Olyphant plays men who have already decided how the conversation ends and are waiting politely for you to catch up. Seth Bullock in Deadwood is that at boiling point, a sheriff whose temper arrives about a second ahead of his judgement. Raylan Givens in Justified is the same instrument tuned to a lazier register, Kentucky courtesy laid over a drawn gun. Both rest on the same trick: he underplays the line and lets the hat, the posture and the pause carry it.

The comedy came later and was the surprise. Santa Clarita Diet turned him into a flailing suburban husband, The Grinder let him play a preening version of himself, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood used the same handsomeness ironically, casting him as a television cowboy watching his genre fade out. He has since kept the western going in Justified: City Primeval and moved into prestige science fiction with Alien: Earth. The consistent finding is that he is funnier than his casting suggests and considerably better in a period piece than in a modern thriller.