Rory McCann

Rory McCann is enormous, which decided a great deal about his career before he had any say in it. Born in Glasgow in 1969, he was scenery in Scottish film early on, in Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher and the bleak canal-barge drama Young Adam, with the odd bit of British television around them.

Then Hot Fuzz cast him as a village giant who communicates almost entirely in grunts, and Game of Thrones cast him as a burned man with a permanent grievance, and the second of those became one of the most loved characters in modern television. Sandor Clegane is a bully written to be despised who gradually turns into the show's most honest person, and McCann plays him with a very specific flatness: no self-pity, no speeches he does not mean, contempt for everyone in the room including himself. The comedy is real too. He gets more out of a two-word reply than most of that cast managed with monologues.

Since then he has taken the parts his size and face attract, mostly barbarians and heavies: a game-world warlord in Jumanji: The Next Level, a general in Gladiator II, an outlaw in the western Slow West. Slow West is the interesting one, a quiet, odd little film that uses his bulk against type. He also voices Megatron in Transformers: EarthSpark, which is a sensible use of a voice that sounds like gravel in a bucket.