Ian McShane

Ian McShane says threats the way other people read out the specials. In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) his Blackbeard barely raises his voice; the rigging on his ship tightens on its own when he draws his sword, and he looks faintly tired of it. As Winston in the John Wick films he sits in candlelight and explains the rules of a world in which everyone is trying to kill everyone else, and he makes the small print sound like a favour. He does not move much. He waits, holds the look, and lets the other actor decide how frightened to be.

The career has a long British first half. He trained at RADA, made his film debut in The Wild and the Willing (1962), and spent years in British television, most visibly in Lovejoy (1986–1994), the BBC series he led for eight years and also directed episodes of. Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast (2001) gave him Teddy Bass, a gangster with enough quiet authority to keep a heist plot from becoming a chore, and it is the film that sent him to America. Then came Deadwood (2004–2006), David Milch's Western, and Al Swearengen, the saloon owner who talks like a Jacobean playwright and behaves like a slaughterman. It remains the performance to watch first. McShane treats Milch's tangled sentences as something a man might actually use while thinking and bullying at once, and we laughed at the swearing and then felt uneasy about how quickly he had us on his side. He went back to the part for the 2019 film.

Since then the parts have been smaller and the films larger. Winston, across four films with Chad Stahelski and five with Keanu Reeves, is the best of them, an enigmatic hotel owner who gives the series its manners. But by John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) the lore had swollen, and even McShane's relish cannot stop a man reading out a rulebook from feeling like a delay. Ballerina (2025) uses him to deliver a child to a door and little more. In Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) his Tai Lung, the frightening one back in 2008, returns for a gag and a fight and is gone, a cameo in his own comeback. Blackbeard is the clearest case. He is the best thing in that film, and the script keeps leaving him on deck while other people go and fetch things.

The complaint is not with him. Hollywood has learned what he can do, a still, dry, unhurried menace, and has been content to buy it by the scene. American Gods (2017–2021) kept him on television in between. What he needs is another writer who will let him talk for a page and then have someone interrupt. Until then, watch Deadwood, then Sexy Beast, and treat the rest as a man doing his job well in rooms that do not deserve him.