Jorma Taccone

Jorma Taccone is one third of The Lonely Island, the comedy group he formed with childhood friends Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, and the member most people could not pick out of a lineup. That is largely a division of labour: Samberg is the face, while Taccone and Schaffer did the directing.

His debut behind the camera was MacGruber in 2010, a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched to feature length, which he co-wrote. It failed commercially, then spent a decade turning into a cult object and eventually a television series. It is a genuinely strange piece of work, a parody of 1980s action cinema that commits to the bit long past the point of comfort, with a hero who is a coward, a bully and an idiot. He and Schaffer followed it with Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping in 2016, a mockumentary about a pop career collapsing in real time, which is the group's most complete film and also lost money.

As a performer he works mostly in voice and cameo, and he is unusually good at both. He is the Green Goblin in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Shakespeare in The Lego Movie, and assorted small lunatics in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, Storks and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. The best of them is Kung Fury, where he plays a version of Hitler with such stupid commitment that the joke lands on impact and keeps landing.