Kyle MacLachlan

Kyle MacLachlan's first job was the lead in Dune, which is a peculiar way to begin: 24 years old, playing a messiah, in one of the most expensive failures of the 1980s. David Lynch cast him and then kept him, and the second collaboration is where the actor actually arrived. Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet is a clean-cut college kid who finds something rotten in his home town and cannot stop looking, and MacLachlan plays the looking rather than the horror.

That is the whole gift. He performs sincerity so completely that it curdles into strangeness. Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks should be unbearable, a cheerful FBI agent who dictates memos about pie to a woman he has never met, and instead he became one of the most loved characters on American television, because MacLachlan never once winks. He played Cooper in the original series, in the film prequel and in the 2017 return, and won a Golden Globe for it.

The middle of the career is a strange collection: a corporate villain in a live-action cartoon, a casino manager in Showgirls, Ray Manzarek in The Doors. Television rescued him. He was Charlotte's excruciating husband on Sex and the City, Orson Hodge on Desperate Housewives, and more recently the Overseer in Fallout, where the joke is that a man this pleasant is running something this sinister. He also voices the father in the Inside Out films, which is the version of him most children now know.