Tony Amendola

Tony Amendola has spent three decades being cast as the man in the room who knows more than everyone else in it. The film credits here start around 1991 with a doctor in The Borrower, and the part that fixed his reputation arrived in 1997: Master Bra'tac, the Jaffa elder of Stargate SG-1, which he returned to across the run of the show.

What he does with a role like that is refuse to soften it. Bra'tac is a teacher played with impatience rather than warmth. The same instinct runs through Edouard Kagame, leader of the revolutionary group Liber8 on Continuum, a man Amendola gives the calm of somebody who has already done the arithmetic and does not expect you to like the answer. Then Once Upon a Time cast him as Geppetto, the one part in his catalogue built on plain decency, and he plays it without a wink.

Horror keeps hiring him as clergy. He is Father Perez in Annabelle in 2014 and Father Perez again in The Curse of La Llorona in 2019, Father Quintero in The Legend of Zorro after playing the aristocrat Don Luiz in The Mask of Zorro seven years earlier, and there are a Father Tirmaco, a Padre Somera and a Father Estaban further down the list. Away from screen acting he voiced the Archmage Khadgar through several World of Warcraft expansions, from Warlords of Draenor to The War Within.

Recent work has let him be nastier: Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante in Black Bird, King Levitica in Rebel Moon, the Elder in Castlevania. At the age when most character actors are handed grandfathers, he is playing men who give orders.