Jerry O'Connell

Jerry O'Connell was twelve when Stand by Me reached cinemas. Born in New York City in 1974, he plays Vern Tessio in it, the heavy, anxious one at the back of the group, and the performance is unusually unguarded for a child actor: he is not being cute, he is being genuinely embarrassed. That was followed by a lead on the sitcom My Secret Identity and then Quinn Mallory on Sliders, a science-fiction series that ran for years largely on his enthusiasm.

The adult career leaned into a specific type: men whose self-belief runs comfortably ahead of the evidence, played without asking you to feel sorry for them. Frank Cushman in Jerry Maguire is the model, a hot-prospect quarterback whose handshake means nothing. Derek in Scream 2, Joe in Joe's Apartment, Michael in Tomcats, Charlie Carbone in Kangaroo Jack, Derrick Jones in Piranha 3D. He commits hard to material that does not always deserve it, which is a real skill and rarely a rewarded one.

Then two long television runs as Detective Woody Hoyt, on Crossing Jordan and again on Las Vegas, and the single 2010 to 2011 season of the legal drama The Defenders. More recently he has built a substantial voice career: he has been Superman across a string of DC animated features, and he plays the loud, chest-forward Commander Jack Ransom on Star Trek: Lower Decks, a part that is essentially an affectionate parody of the type he spent the nineties playing straight. He also works as a television host.