Arnold Vosloo

Arnold Vosloo was a stage actor in South Africa and a lead in South African films such as Boetie Gaan Border Toe before emigrating to the United States in the late 1980s, at which point Hollywood took one look at the bone structure and the accent and made him a villain for the next thirty years.

He is very good at it, and the reason is restraint. Vosloo does not sneer. He plays antagonists as men who are simply going to do the thing, with no evident pleasure in it, which unsettles far more than menace performed. Imhotep in The Mummy is the role everyone knows: a high priest brought back from the dead, with most of his dialogue in a language nobody in the audience speaks, doing nearly all his acting with his eyes, inside a film otherwise built on jokes. It worked well enough that he returned for The Mummy Returns.

The most interesting credit is one almost nobody watched. He took the lead in Darkman II and Darkman III, playing the burned scientist Liam Neeson had originated, which meant inheriting a part that is mostly bandages and voice. Elsewhere: Pik van Cleef in Hard Target, opposite Lance Henriksen; Colonel Coetzee in Blood Diamond, which lets him use his own accent and his own nationality and is his best dramatic work; Zartan across two G.I. Joe films; and a steady run of DC animated roles including Black Adam and Abin Sur. The late career has been direct-to-video action and international productions, plus Silverton Siege in 2022, a South African film about a 1980 hostage standoff, which is the closest he has come to going home on screen.