Robert John Burke

Robert John Burke started out in the New York independent scene, taking leads in Hal Hartley's early features before Hollywood worked out what to do with him. In 1993 alone he climbed into the suit for RoboCop 3 and played Frank McLaury in Tombstone, and by the middle of the decade he had the lead in the Stephen King adaptation Thinner. None of it made him a star, which turned out to be the making of a long career.

What he does better than almost anyone is institutional menace. His Ed Tucker on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, an Internal Affairs investigator who circled the show's detectives from 2002 to 2020, works because Burke never plays him as a villain. He plays a man doing an unpopular job correctly, which is far more irritating to the heroes than open corruption would be. Bart Bass on Gossip Girl runs the same engine in a dinner jacket, a father whose approval is the scarcest resource in the show, and Mickey Gavin on Rescue Me let him be funny about the same rigidity.

Since then he has become a reliable one scene weapon for directors with taste: the police chief in BlacKkKlansman, a small part in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a prickly townsman in The Last of Us. Fifty odd credits in, he is the actor a casting director calls when a scene needs someone whose authority the audience will accept without being told to.