Peter Mullan

Peter Mullan spent the first half of the 1990s in other people's films in small hard parts: a labourer for Ken Loach in Riff-Raff, one of the flatmates' problems in Shallow Grave, a veteran in Braveheart, and Swanney the dealer in Trainspotting, a performance of maybe eight minutes that everyone who saw the film remembers. Then My Name Is Joe made him a lead, playing a recovering alcoholic in Glasgow with no self-pity available anywhere in the performance.

He has the hardest face in Scottish cinema and is a much subtler actor than that suggests. The trick is that his men are frightening and tired at the same time, so the violence never reads as a pose. Joseph in Tyrannosaur opens that film doing something unforgivable and spends the rest of it being watched rather than excused, which only works because Mullan refuses to soften him by a single degree.

He directs as well. The Magdalene Sisters, about the Irish laundries, is a furious piece of filmmaking, and Neds followed it. As an actor he has become one of Britain's reliable heavies for large productions: a Death Eater in Harry Potter, a dwarf king in The Rings of Power, a rural crime patriarch in Ozark, a lake-country brute in Top of the Lake. The quality of the material varies wildly. He does not.