Tommy Lister Jr.

Tommy Lister Jr. was born in Compton in 1958 with a detached and deformed retina, was blind in his right eye, and turned the drooping eye into a career. He wrestled first, briefly, and the two trades fed each other: he played Zeus opposite Hulk Hogan in No Holds Barred in 1989, took the character into the WWF, and revived the feud in WCW in 1996 as Z-Gangsta.

The role that made him permanent is Deebo in Friday, the neighbourhood bully who takes whatever he wants and says almost nothing, and it works because Lister plays him as a fact of life rather than a villain. He returned for Next Friday. Two years after the first one he was President Lindberg in The Fifth Element, running a future Earth from behind a desk, playing it with total gravity while the film went insane around him. That is the whole trick: enormous man, unhurried delivery, no visible effort.

The rest is a working character actor's shelf. Winston in Jackie Brown, Cassius in Little Nicky, a soldier in Universal Soldier, a prisoner in Austin Powers in Goldmember, and a long list of films nobody defends. The best surprise came at the end, when Zootopia cast him as Finnick, a fennec fox roughly a foot tall with the deepest voice in the film, a joke that only lands because the voice is exactly what the animators drew against. He worked until 2020, the year he died, and Zootopia 2 uses archive recordings of him.