Matthew Lillard

Lillard's early roles ran on pure kinetic energy. John Waters cast him as the horror-obsessed son in Serial Mom, Hackers made him Cereal Killer, and then Scream gave him Stu Macher, the loudest and neediest guy at the party. Hardly anyone else could have played it, because he performs a horror movie character as though he has seen every horror movie, and it made him a fixture of the genre for the rest of his working life.

The next decade sorted into two piles. There were the broad comedies, She's All That and Without a Paddle, and there was Shaggy. He took the live-action Scooby-Doo in 2002 and turned an impression into an inheritance, voicing the character in cartoons and direct-to-video features ever since, which is a stranger and far more permanent legacy than any of his live-action work.

Then came a long quiet stretch, and then Alexander Payne cast him in The Descendants as the man on the other end of the plot, and Lillard played him small, sad and utterly ordinary. It is the best thing on his CV. He is now in a third act as a horror headliner, carrying the Five Nights at Freddy's films and returning to Scream, and he is one of the few actors of his generation who seems to genuinely enjoy the fanbase he ended up with.