Ned Dennehy

Few faces in British and Irish television get more work than Dennehy's: hollow, weathered, the eyes set far enough back that a director can point a camera at him and skip a page of dialogue. He has been working since the late 1990s, and for a long stretch the jobs were one-scene grotesques. A mad monk in King Arthur. A coroner in Child 44. A sentinel in Robin Hood. A tout in Veronica Guerin.

The good roles arrive when someone lets him be still instead of strange. Charlie Strong on Peaky Blinders is the clearest example, a yard owner and fence who spends nine years being the closest thing the Shelby family has to a decent uncle, and Dennehy plays him with a warmth nothing in the casting predicted. Dickensian handed him Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghosts, which is to say a functioning man with a locked heart, and he declines to make a caricature of it.

Then there is Mandy, where Panos Cosmatos let him off the leash entirely as Brother Swan, a cult lieutenant with a ruined face and a hallucinatory drawl. It is the performance most people who know his name know him for, and it is the one that proves the face was only ever half of the equipment.