Ray Stevenson

Stevenson did not become an actor until he was nearly thirty. Born in Lisburn in Northern Ireland and raised in the north east of England, the son of a Royal Air Force pilot and an Irish mother, he went to art school instead and was working as an interior designer for a London architecture firm when he decided to try. He got into Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, graduated at twenty nine, and then spent a decade on British television before anything broke.

King Arthur in 2004 gave him Dagonet, and the following year the series Rome gave him Titus Pullo, which remains the best thing he ever did. Pullo is a brawling, cheerful, dangerous soldier who is also the warmest presence in a brutal show, and the performance is a perfect demonstration of what Stevenson had: enormous physical presence used lightly. He was a big man who never played big.

The rest was mostly genre, and he was reliably better than his material: Volstagg in the Thor films, Marcus Eaton across the Divergent series, Porthos in The Three Musketeers, Blackbeard in Black Sails, Frank Castle in Punisher: War Zone, and a memorably hateful colonial officer in RRR. His last major role was Baylan Skoll in Ahsoka, a piece of casting that finally used his stillness rather than his size. He died in 2023 at fifty eight, a few months before that series reached television.