Mark Addy

Mark Addy became permanently recognisable in 1997 as Dave Horsefall, one of the unemployed men who decide to take their clothes off for money in The Full Monty. It made him famous without making him a star, which is a specific and not unenviable career.

What he does better than almost anyone is play the big man who is quietly frightened. Horsefall is the one convinced his own body is the joke. Robert Baratheon, the drunk king he played in the first season of Game of Thrones, is a warrior who has eaten and drunk his way out of the only thing he was ever good at. Both parts land because Addy plays the sadness first and lets the comedy arrive on its own.

British television has kept him busier than film ever did: the sitcom run of The Thin Blue Line and Trollied, an American family comedy in Still Standing, Hercules in Atlantis, the thriller series The Rig, the Nottinghamshire drama Sherwood. Hollywood, meanwhile, mostly used him as period furniture, a squire, a steamer captain, a Victorian friend, and once, memorably, as Fred Flintstone.

Born in York in 1964, he has never sanded the Yorkshire out of the voice. In 2023 he put Dave Horsefall's overalls back on for the sequel series, twenty six years after the film, which almost nobody gets to do with a comedy character.