Peter Facinelli

Peter Facinelli was born in Queens in 1973 and spent the late nineties in the standard young-actor scrum, Foxfire, Telling You, a three-hander in a hotel suite called The Big Kahuna where he played the earnest true believer opposite two much older salesmen. The part that stuck was Mike Dexter in Can't Hardly Wait, the graduating king of the school, and it is a small masterpiece of a specific type: the handsome boy whose confidence is entirely borrowed from his circumstances.

He has been mining that seam ever since, and he is better at it than his filmography suggests. Coop on Nurse Jackie is the definitive version, a doctor whose swagger is visibly a nervous condition, needy and grabby and insufferable and consistently the funniest thing in a bleak show. Maxwell Lord on Supergirl is the same charm hardened into money. Fastlane made him a network lead in 2002, and Damages and Six Feet Under used him in single arcs where the surface is the point.

Then Twilight, which is the opposite casting and the reason most people know his face. Carlisle Cullen is calm, paternal, unhurried, a doctor who has had centuries to become patient, and Facinelli plays him across five films with no trace of the smirk. He has since moved into directing, with Breaking and Exiting, The Vanished and On Fire.