Ethan Hawke

Hawke has been on screen since 1985, when he made his debut as a boy in the science fiction adventure Explorers. Dead Poets Society four years later made him the face of a certain kind of sensitive American teenager, and Reality Bites in 1994 nearly trapped him there for good. What saved him was Richard Linklater, who cast him in Before Sunrise in 1995 and then kept working with him for the next thirty years.

Talk is his real skill. Very few American film actors can carry a long unbroken conversation and make it sound unwritten, and the Before films are essentially a career-length experiment in exactly that: the same two people, three films, nine years between each one, ageing in real time on camera. Boyhood runs the same trick from the other side, with Hawke as a father who slowly improves across a decade.

The second act nobody predicted is horror. Sinister, The Purge and then the masked abductor of The Black Phone gave him a run of genuinely unpleasant work, and he is good at it precisely because the boyish decency is still legible underneath. Elsewhere there are five Academy Award nominations, a Tony nomination, and in First Reformed the best performance of his career, a priest whose faith is failing him in slow motion. He also writes novels and directs, which is either admirable or exhausting depending on your patience for actors who do everything.