Rami Malek

Rami Malek grew up in Torrance, California, the son of Coptic immigrants from Egypt, studied theatre, and spent his twenties in the parts that go to actors with unusual faces: a sitcom son in The War at Home, a marine in The Pacific, a pharaoh in the Night at the Museum films required mainly to be funny in a headdress.

Mr. Robot is where the face became the point. Elliot Alderson is a hacker with severe social anxiety who narrates his own life to an imaginary audience, and Malek plays him with an unnerving stillness and eyes that never quite settle, holding an entire prestige drama together from inside a hoodie. It won him the Emmy and remains the best sustained work he has done.

Bohemian Rhapsody won him the Academy Award and is the more complicated credit. The film is a sanitised jukebox biography; the performance inside it is committed, physically precise and unafraid of camp, and it made him the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win Best Actor. It is fair to say the award belongs more to the Live Aid sequence than to the ninety minutes preceding it.

Since then he has played the villain in No Time to Die, a small and pivotal part in Oppenheimer, and leads in The Amateur and Nuremberg. He is a strange, specific presence who works best when a director builds around the strangeness rather than sanding it down.