Tamer Hassan

Tamer Hassan was born in London in 1968 to a Turkish Cypriot family and became the most reliable heavy in British cinema for roughly a decade. His breakthrough was Fred, leader of the Millwall firm, opposite Danny Dyer in The Football Factory (2004), and the same year he turned up in Layer Cake.

He is a physically large man and the interesting thing is how rarely he uses it directly. Hassan's menace comes out of friendliness: he plays the chatty, hospitable one, the man offering you a drink, and the threat sits in the fact that his manner does not change when the conversation does. That is a much harder trick than shouting, and it is why the same casting kept coming back to him.

For most of the 2000s he ran two careers at once. In one he was a fixture of British crime films, The Business, Cass, Dead Man Running, and eventually The Hooligan Factory, a cycle he helped define and then helped send up. In the other he took single scenes in very large productions: a limo driver in Batman Begins, a Chechen in Eastern Promises, Ares in Clash of the Titans, a small part in Kick-Ass. He was also in Game of Thrones.

The work has stayed in that lane, taking in the television Snatch and the Rise of the Footsoldier series. He is not stretching, and there is no evidence he wants to. What he does, he does better than almost anyone else in that market.