Colin Salmon

Colin Salmon has one of the most recognisable voices in British screen acting and a career largely built on being the person in the room who outranks everyone else in it. He played Charles Robinson across three James Bond films, from Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997 to Die Another Day in 2002, which made him the face of MI6 competence for a generation of viewers, and he has been ringing changes on that authority ever since: the commander of the team sent into the Hive in Resident Evil, the corporate fixer in Alien vs Predator, a senior officer in London Has Fallen.

The interesting part is how little he does to earn it. Salmon plays authority as calm rather than volume, which is why he can be dropped into a scene with no setup and the audience immediately understands the hierarchy. It also means the rare moments when the calm cracks land unusually hard, and the better roles have known to save them.

Television has given him more range than film. He was Walter Steele across Arrow and General Zod on Krypton, and has appeared in Doctor Who, Merlin and The Musketeers. In 2023 he joined EastEnders as George Knight, which puts him in front of a far larger regular audience than most of his film work ever reached. He also supplied voice and likeness for Agent Carson in the PlayStation VR shooter Blood & Truth, a reminder that a career like his now runs through games as well as screens.