Matt Servitto

Somebody in casting decided a long time ago that Servitto has the face of a man with a badge, and honestly they were right. Born in Teaneck, New Jersey in 1965, he started on daytime television as Trask Bodine on All My Children at the end of the eighties, and has spent the decades since playing law enforcement and elected officials: FBI agents, deputies, detectives, judges, an elected representative on Brotherhood.

The signature role is Agent Dwight Harris on The Sopranos, and it is a study in patience. Harris is the federal presence that hangs around the edges of the series for years, surfacing whenever the show needs to remember the outside world exists, and Servitto plays him not as a nemesis but as a man doing paperwork about someone he has come to know far too well. The performance works because it is never adversarial enough to be clean.

Banshee gave him the biggest sustained part of his career as Deputy Brock Lotus, the one recognisably decent professional in a show designed around lawlessness, and it is the most anyone has ever given him to do. Elsewhere he has been the straight man in comedies (Eddie in Hitch, Arty in Enchanted), a supplier in Compliance, a detective in Big Fan, and, in the one credit that reads like a joke at the expense of all the others, Satan on Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.

He is still at it, with George Wolf in The Alto Knights and an appearance discussing the old job on Talking Sopranos.