Marton Csokas

Watch what Marton Csokas does with a sentence. He takes his time over the consonants, keeps his hands where you can see them, gives the person opposite every courtesy, and somewhere in the middle of it you realise you would rather be in another room. That is the trick he is hired for: charm that turns to threat without anything visibly changing. He is nearly always the antagonist, or the man with authority who has decided not to use it kindly, and he plays both with the same aristocratic calm.

The career comes in phases, and they are not hard to read. New Zealand stage and Shortland Street in the early 1990s, then Australian work and four years as Borias on Xena: Warrior Princess (1997–2001). Peter Jackson made him Celeborn in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003), which put him in front of the world and gave him little to do once he was there. After that came the Hollywood heavies: xXx (2002), Jarda in The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Guy de Lusignan in Kingdom of Heaven (2005), the courteous villain Teddy in The Equalizer (2014), Crespin in The Last Duel (2021). In between he went to Australia for Romulus, My Father (2007) and to television for Into the Badlands, and the smaller films are where he has most been allowed to show what else he can do.

What works is the refusal to play evil as evil. He has said that when he plays a bad character he looks for "their charm, their good points, the things that make them human", and The Equalizer is the clearest case: a man who is unfailingly pleasant and plainly should not be. Ridley Scott has used him twice, in Kingdom of Heaven and The Last Duel, both times as part of the period furniture rather than as a lead, which tells you how the industry sees him. Our own reviews of the two films of his we have covered, The Bourne Supremacy and The Last Duel, do not mention him at all. That is not a slight. It is what happens to an actor who is given one scene and plays it without raising his voice. We remember his encounter with Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy more clearly than the size of the part deserves, and we were unsettled by it, because he barely moves. The stillness is the threat.

The complaint against him is the obvious one: the villain work has been steady enough that the leads never came, and the large productions cut his parts short. Celeborn is a fine piece of casting and a brief one. If you want to see what he can do, go to the Australian films. If you are watching a big one and a well-spoken man appears with the faint air of having already decided how this ends, you know who it is.