Graham McTavish

Graham McTavish is usually standing slightly behind someone more important, and he is usually the one we look at. A Scottish voice that comes in low and stays there, a build that makes armour look like a decision rather than a costume, and a way of holding still while everyone else is acting. Peter Jackson used it three times over as Dwalin in the Hobbit films (2012 to 2014); Outlander has used it since 2014 as Dougal MacKenzie; House of the Dragon (2022) made him Ser Harrold Westerling, a knight, which is to say the same man with a different oath. The parts change their names. He does not change much, and that is what he is for.

The career took a while to find that man. He came up on stage in the mid-1980s, at the Royal Court and the National Theatre, and spent the best part of two decades in supporting parts on television and in film before Rambo (2008) turned him into a fixture of the big, loud and armed. He has said as much himself: "Every actor starts out thinking I want to play Hamlet." Rambo, he found, was more fun. The Hobbit trilogy followed, then Creed (2015) as Tommy Holiday, then a long run of television and a second career in voices, for the Uncharted games and Castlevania among others.

Our own reviews say less about him than we would like, because he is not the kind of actor a review stops for. We scored Creed 85 and An Unexpected Journey 60 and mentioned him in neither, which is the character actor's fate and, on his own account, his choice. We will admit this much: in An Unexpected Journey, among a company of dwarves we struggled to tell apart under the beards, we could always find him, and were quietly glad to. He stands as if the ground has offended him, and in a film that shouts for most of its 169 minutes, a man who simply plants himself gives a scene somewhere to rest.

The complaint against him is the obvious one. He has been cast as the tough one, the loyal one, the one with the weapon, so often that nobody has thought to try anything else, and we cannot point to a film that proves them wrong. He says he prefers villains and complicated men to heroes, and the record backs him up. He would be wasted as Hamlet, and he knows it. The interesting question is whether anyone will ever think to offer him Claudius.