Stephen Dillane

Stephen Dillane belongs to the theatre first, and it shows in everything he does on camera. He played Hamlet in 1990, was in the first wave of Angels in America in 1993, won a Tony for the 2000 Broadway run of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, and performed a one-man Macbeth in 2005. People in his profession call him an actor's actor, which usually means an actor who will not help you.

What he does is withhold. Other performers signal; Dillane declines to, and makes you lean in. The specialism that follows from it is a very unfashionable type: men who are certain, correct in their own terms, and impossible to warm to. Stannis Baratheon on Game of Thrones has no charm whatsoever and absolute conviction, and the show got harder to watch precisely when he had a point. Leonard Woolf in The Hours is the same instrument turned to patience and grief. In Darkest Hour and Outlaw King he plays the man in the room who thinks the hero is wrong, and he never plays it stupid.

His film career is almost entirely supporting: Spy Game, King Arthur, Zero Dark Thirty, The Greatest Game Ever Played, William Godwin in Mary Shelley. Television has given him the bigger parts. Thomas Jefferson in John Adams brought a Primetime Emmy nomination, and he holds an International Emmy for Best Actor. The recent run, Vigil, Sherwood, KAOS and The Outrun, suggests he has stopped worrying about whether anyone finds him likeable.