Chris Potter

Canadian television has kept Chris Potter employed for more than thirty years, mostly in the kind of role that holds a series together rather than the kind that wins prizes. He came up through soaps and syndicated drama: Sgt. Tom Ryan on Silk Stalkings, Peter Caine on Kung Fu: The Legend Continues as the son of Kwai Chang Caine, and later a recurring run as a con artist on The Young and the Restless.

His most durable job is Tim Fleming on Heartland, which he has played since 2007, and it demonstrates what he does well. Tim is a man with a bad history who is trying to be useful, and Potter plays the effort rather than the redemption, which is what keeps a character like that from turning saccharine across a very long run. The same steadiness carries the Good Witch films, where he played Jake Russell in five features between 2008 and 2013.

Voice acting gave him a second career with an entirely different audience. He was Gambit in the 1992 X-Men animated series, the version most readers still hear in their heads, and he returned to the franchise three decades later as Cable in X-Men '97. In between sits a working actor's mix of Canadian genre and family pictures: Dr. Jack Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, Bill Fawcett in The Pacifier, and creature features like Spiders and Arachnid.