Ben Foster

Television had Ben Foster as a teenager, including a run on Freaks and Geeks, and gave him his first real notice as Russell Corwin on Six Feet Under between 2003 and 2005. What followed was a decade of playing the most volatile person in the room. Alpha Dog, The Punisher, 30 Days of Night, Hostage: if a film needed someone whose next move you could not predict, he was the call.

The specific skill is that Foster never plays instability as noise. Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma is the model. He is a killer with immaculate manners, calm nearly all the way through, and the menace comes from how carefully he speaks. Tanner Howard in Hell or High Water works the same seam from the other end: a man who has decided that recklessness is a form of love, very funny right up to the point where he is not, and it won Foster an Independent Spirit Award.

He is also drawn to films that hurt. Lone Survivor and Emancipation are endurance tests. The Messenger, where he plays a soldier assigned to casualty notification duty, is the quietest and much the best of them. That appetite has occasionally outrun the material: the studio run around Warcraft, Inferno and The Mechanic wants only his surface, and he is duller there than in anything he has done at a quarter of the budget. Leave No Trace is the counterexample and probably his best film, a father whose damage is never explained, a performance assembled almost entirely out of restraint.