Brendan Fletcher

Brendan Fletcher is from the Comox Valley in British Columbia and the awards arrived early. He was nominated for a Gemini for his acting debut, the television film Little Criminals, won a Leo Award for the series Caitlin's Way, and won the Genie for Best Leading Actor for John Greyson's The Law of Enclosures, with a further Genie nomination for Turning Paige. On paper that is the start of a serious Canadian film career.

What followed was mostly genre, and a lot of it. Freddy vs. Jason, both Ginger Snaps sequels, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne twice, Leprechaun: Origins, three Rampage films as the mass shooter Bill Williamson. He is extremely good at one thing and the industry noticed: wired, damaged young men whose next move you cannot predict, played with a jittery physical energy that does not read as acting. In cheap horror that quality is a shortcut. In better films it is a genuine asset.

The better films are worth naming. Dickens in Terry Gilliam's Tideland is the performance, a brain-damaged man in a rural nightmare, and Fletcher plays him with tenderness rather than tics. Eric Fraser in Cardinal, Willie Jackson in Edwin Boyd, Bill Leyden in The Pacific and Robert in the opening stretch of The Last of Us are the others. He was Krampus, one of the codenamed mercenaries, in Violent Night. The gap between the awards and the filmography is the honest story here, and he is better than most of what he has been in.