Jason Schwartzman

Schwartzman made his film debut in Wes Anderson's Rushmore as Max Fischer, a schoolboy running a dozen extracurricular societies while failing every class, and that performance quietly set the terms for everything after it. He is a member of the Coppola family and a musician as well as an actor, but the through line has been Anderson: six further films after Rushmore, from The Darjeeling Limited, which he also has a co-writing credit on, to Asteroid City.

The specific thing he does is unearned confidence. His characters believe their own pitch, and he never signals to the audience that they should not. Max Fischer is the pure form. Cousin Ben in Moonrise Kingdom sells a children's wedding like a man moving stolen goods. M. Jean, the concierge in The Grand Budapest Hotel, has barely any lines and treats each of them as an important announcement. Even Ash in Fantastic Mr. Fox, sulking in a fox-sized tracksuit, is a boy convinced he is the hero of the story.

Away from that world he takes parts other actors would overplay: Gideon Graves in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette, Josto Fadda in a season of Fargo, and Lucky Flickerman, the game-show host of the Hunger Games prequel. The voice work is strong too, particularly the villain of Across the Spider-Verse and the postman in Klaus.

What he has become is the character actor a film hires when a scene needs somebody to be certain and wrong, which is a narrower job than leading man and one he does better than almost anybody.