Ryan Kwanten

Australian television found him as a teenager. Spellbinder and Echo Point both sit at the bottom of this page dated 1995, and then came the soap that trains half of Australian screen acting: he played Vinnie Patterson on Home and Away from 1997 to 2002, a job not among the credits listed here. Summerland moved him to American teen drama in 2004, and four years later True Blood made him famous.

Jason Stackhouse is the career, and the performance is smarter than the character by a distance. What Kwanten understood, and what almost no actor manages, is how to play stupidity with total sincerity: Jason believes every idea he has, in the order he has it, and there is never a flicker to the audience saying that the actor knows better. Comic characters built that way usually wear out in a season. This one lasted the show's whole run, from 2008 to 2014, and remained the most reliably funny thing in it long after the plotting had come apart.

What followed is a genre workhorse's filmography: heist and disaster pictures like The Hurricane Heist and Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, Australian crime in Red Hill and Mystery Road, science fiction in 2067, horror in Dead Silence and the single-location Glorious, plus voice work as Kludd in Legend of the Guardians and the lead in Blinky Bill the Movie. He produced and starred in The Oath. The better late work is the supporting television: Thomas Weylin in the adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's 1979 novel Kindred, and George Bell in the first season of Them. Primitive War and two 2026-dated films keep the run going.