Simon Yam

Modelling came first, then television. Yam signed with TVB and spent years in Hong Kong series before moving into film properly in 1987, and once he did he essentially never stopped: the catalogue holds well over two hundred credits, which tells you both how hard he works and how uneven the results are. Nobody makes that many films and keeps a clean average.

The reason he matters is the run with Johnnie To. PTU (2003), Election (2005), Triangle (2007) and Sparrow (2008) fixed his adult persona, and Election is the sharpest use of it. As Lok he wins a triad leadership contest by being the reasonable candidate, the one who speaks softly and lets everyone else look unstable, and Yam plays it with an administrator's calm that is far more frightening than shouting. His menace is procedural. He looks like a man who has already filed the paperwork.

Outside To he is the anchor of a great deal of Hong Kong action: the detective in SPL: Kill Zone (2005), a part in its follow-up, the triad boss across the first three Young and Dangerous films, Zhou Qing Quan in Ip Man (2008) and Ip Man 2 (2010), an early role in Bullet in the Head (1990), and a long line of mainland co-productions through the 2010s. Night and Fog (2009) and Echoes of the Rainbow (2010) are where the softer, sadder register lives, and they are the corrective for anyone who thinks of him only as a gangster.