Brandon Routh

Superman Returns made Routh internationally famous in 2006 and then left him holding a role that did not continue. Being cast as Superman is a career event that usually happens before anybody knows whether an actor can act, and the reception of one film decided a great deal about what he was offered next. He is good in it, physically precise and genuinely warm, and it did not matter much.

What the casting missed is that he is funny. Todd Ingram in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best thing he has done: a preening antagonist played completely straight, with total conviction in his own excellence, which is exactly why the joke works. He came back to the character over a decade later for the animated Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. Daniel Shaw in Chuck runs the same trick at length, a humourless super-agent in a comedy that keeps puncturing him.

DC eventually took him back on television, as Ray Palmer in Arrow and then across several seasons of Legends of Tomorrow, a show that worked out faster than any of his films that his best setting is sincere and slightly ridiculous at the same time. He has a Saturn award for lead actor. The rest is a working actor's record: the title role in the comic adaptation Dylan Dog, which is a swing that misses, plus Karla, Unthinkable, 400 Days, a stretch of romantic comedies and, lately, Ick.