Ralph Ineson

For most of the 1990s and 2000s Ralph Ineson was a working British television actor, known at home as Chris Finch, the sales rep in The Office who is simultaneously the funniest and the worst person in the building. It was a living and a dead end, for a man whose main asset is a voice like a quarry: deep, Yorkshire, and able to make an ordinary line of dialogue sound like a sentence being passed.

Robert Eggers is the reason a second career exists. Casting Ineson as William in The Witch set that voice against dialogue written in seventeenth-century English, and it works because he plays the father as proud, incompetent and frightened rather than as a horror archetype. Eggers used him again in The Northman, and David Lowery built the title role of The Green Knight around the same instrument.

The last decade has been a run of grim authority and prestige monsters: a general in Chernobyl, the doctor in Nosferatu, Professor Krempe in Frankenstein, and Galactus in The Fantastic 4: First Steps, a part that amounts to a voice with a planet attached. He narrates constantly and does substantial video game work, including Charles Vane in Assassin's Creed IV, Lorath Nahr in Diablo IV and Cid in Final Fantasy XVI. He is in his fifties and busier than he has ever been, which is not the usual shape of a character actor's career.