Armin Shimerman

Armin Shimerman has been on television since the 1980s, and for a great deal of that time he has been underneath something. He turned up on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987 credited as a talking gift box, a job that either ends a career or starts one. It started one. In 1993 he became Quark, the Ferengi bartender at the centre of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and played him across all seven seasons.

Quark is the whole argument for what he does. Buried in a full prosthetic head, with only his eyes, his hands and his voice left to work with, he built a character who is funny, self-interested and never merely a joke, in a franchise that had previously used Ferengi as a punchline. Buffy the Vampire Slayer took the same instrument and removed the latex, casting him as Principal Snyder through its first three seasons.

Run down the rest of the character names and a pattern appears: Judge Younger, Judge Hooper, Dr. Gottesman, Dr. Patemkin, Dr. Potter, Dr. Seger, a prison psychiatrist, an interrogation sergeant. He is the man behind the desk who delivers the institutional bad news, and he does it with a dryness that makes the scene move faster than it deserves to.

The voice work is a career in its own right: General Skarr across Evil Con Carne and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Psycho Pirate for Batman, Superman in DC shorts, Dr. Nefarious in the Ratchet & Clank film. His two most-played video-game roles, Nefarious in the games and Andrew Ryan in BioShock, are not among the credits listed here.