James Remar

James Remar trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and came out of it playing thugs. Ajax in The Warriors (1979) is still the calling card, a swaggering gang member with more mouth than sense, and Albert Ganz in 48 Hrs. (1982) refined the type into something genuinely frightening: a career criminal with no visible interior life. Dutch Schultz in The Cotton Club (1984) put him in a prestige picture doing much the same thing in a better suit.

He was originally cast as Corporal Hicks in Aliens (1986) and replaced during production by Michael Biehn, the kind of near miss that decides a career. What followed was four decades of steady, unglamorous work in other people's films: Drugstore Cowboy, Miracle on 34th Street, Judge Dredd, What Lies Beneath, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Blade: Trinity, Pineapple Express, RED, Django Unchained, Megalopolis.

Television gave him the two parts that changed how he is seen. Richard Wright in Sex and the City, from 2001 to 2004, let him play charm and unreliability simultaneously. Harry Morgan in Dexter, from 2006, asked for something nobody had wanted from him before: a father delivering moral instruction that keeps curdling as the series goes on. He returned to the role in Dexter: Resurrection in 2025.

There is a substantial voice career running alongside, as Vilgax in Ben 10 and Tonraq in The Legend of Korra, and since 2009 in advertising for a luxury car brand, which has made his voice more familiar than his face to a lot of people who have never seen The Warriors.