Sam Hazeldine

Sam Hazeldine, born in Hammersmith in 1972, has one of those English careers that is invisible as a career and unmissable as a face. Read the list and it is a map of two decades of British television: Prime Suspect 6, Persuasion, Lightfields, Peaky Blinders, Resurrection, Knightfall, Requiem, The Innocents, Temple, Slow Horses, The Sandman, Rain Dogs, Masters of the Air.

What he is repeatedly hired for is menace that does not announce itself. Georgie Sewell in Peaky Blinders, Godfrey in Knightfall, Riah Crain in Mechanic: Resurrection, Chilcott in Grimsby, the commanding officer in '71: men who are dangerous because of what they are permitted to do rather than because of what they want. He has a stillness that reads as authority in period costume and as threat in a modern one, and directors have used it both ways without ever quite building a film around it.

The largest role of the career arrived late. He plays Adar from the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, an elf who leads orcs and calls them his children, a part that asks for grief and command in the same breath. The rest of the film work is honest supporting labour: The Last Duel, The Monuments Men, The Huntsman: Winter's War, The Raven, The Hitman's Bodyguard. Television is where the real record is.