Jason Bateman

Jason Bateman was a child actor before he was anything else, appearing on Little House on the Prairie in the seventies, and he spent two decades in television before the role that reframed him. Michael Bluth on Arrested Development is a straight man written as a moral centre, and Bateman's contribution was to play him as somebody who is smug about being the only sane person in the family and usually wrong about it.

He is the best pure reactor in American comedy. Give him a pause and a flat look and he will get a bigger laugh than the person delivering the joke, which is why he anchors ensemble films so effectively: Horrible Bosses, Game Night, Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder, Juno. Game Night is the purest showcase, a comedy about competitive marriage where his best moments are entirely silent.

The second half of his career has been a deliberate move toward the dark and behind the camera. He directed and starred in Bad Words, played the villain in The Gift, and then built Ozark, where he stars as Marty Byrde and directed multiple episodes. It won him a Golden Globe and a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, plus a Screen Actors Guild Award for the performance.

The trick in Ozark is the same trick as the comedy, held longer: a calm man explaining a reasonable plan, while everything around him gets worse.