Harry Melling

Most child actors from a giant franchise never get a second act. Melling played Dudley Dursley across five Harry Potter films between 2001 and 2010, a part written as a punchline, and then spent the following decade building a genuine character-actor career on stage-trained precision rather than nostalgia. His grandfather was the actor Patrick Troughton, so the trade was already in the family.

The turn came with the anthology western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018, where he plays a travelling performer whose entire existence depends on other people paying attention. He is very good at that specific thing: characters who need to be looked at and are frightened of what happens when the looking stops. Harry Beltik in The Queen's Gambit is a rival who becomes a teacher and then a man quietly aware he has been outgrown. His Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye is chatty, ridiculous and lonely, and he plays all three at once.

He works in a narrow but distinctive lane now: literate period pieces, unsettling independent films, the occasional studio job like The Old Guard. Nobody is pushing him as a leading man, and the career looks better for it.