Nick Frost

Frost came to television through Spaced, playing Mike, a territorial-army obsessive with the emotional range of a very loyal dog, and his career since has been shaped by the partnership with Simon Pegg more than by anything else. The Three Flavours Cornetto films, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End, are the spine of it.

He is very good at playing loyalty as comedy. His characters are an anchor and a liability at the same time, and he never plays the stupidity with contempt. Ed in Shaun of the Dead is a genuinely bad influence who is also the one person the hero cannot bring himself to abandon. Danny Butterman in Hot Fuzz is better still: a village policeman whose entire understanding of the job comes from action films, played with such open enthusiasm that the film's argument about violence lands harder than it has any right to.

He writes as well. He co-wrote Paul with Pegg and co-created the paranormal comedy Truth Seekers with him, and he took the lead on his own in Cuban Fury. Man Stroke Woman and Black Books cover the early British sketch and sitcom years.

Outside that circle he has settled into dependable franchise support: Gobber in the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, a role in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Thomson in The Adventures of Tintin, and voice parts across Ice Age and The Boxtrolls. Attack the Block is the one from the middle years most people missed.