Michael Rooker

Rooker's first lead was the title role in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in 1986, a low-budget film so calm and so unpleasant that it took years to get a proper release. It remains one of the most frightening performances in American cinema, and it typecast him instantly. For the next twenty years he was the volatile one: Chick Gandil in Eight Men Out, Frank Bailey in Mississippi Burning, Rowdy Burns in Days of Thunder, Bill Broussard in JFK, Hal Tucker in Cliffhanger, Sherman McMasters in Tombstone.

What separates him from the other tough-guy character actors of his era is that the hostility always has something injured beneath it. He plays men who are angry because they have been humiliated, which is why Merle Dixon in The Walking Dead worked far better than a straightforward bigot would have, and why Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy ended up as the emotional centre of two films that did not strictly need one.

His most durable relationship is with James Gunn, who has cast him in everything he has made: Slither, Super, both Guardians films, The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker, Creature Commandos and Superman. Gunn understands the thing other directors miss, which is that Rooker is funny. Give him a comic beat and he will take it, and the menace lands harder afterwards for having been undercut.