Rob Morgan

Turk Barrett is a small-time crook who is always in the wrong alley. Across the six connected Marvel series of 2015 to 2019 he gets caught, again and again, by whichever masked person happens to be working that part of town, and Rob Morgan plays him as a man who saw this coming and has decided not to take it personally. It is a running joke, and in Marvel's Daredevil (2015) it is one the show gets right. It is also a fair introduction to what Morgan does: he stands still, says less than everyone around him, and the scene tilts towards him anyway.

He came to it slowly. Background work in 1996, small television parts from the late 2000s, then Turk, then Officer Powell in Stranger Things from 2016 to 2022. The films arrived with Mudbound (2017), as Hap Jackson, a sharecropper in 1940s Mississippi, and Just Mercy (2019), as Herbert Richardson, a man on death row. The same year he took his first lead, as Abe in Bull, a drama about a Black bull rider. The one complaint anyone makes about him is that he has been under-recognised for as long as he has been good, and it is hard to argue with.

What he is good at is pressure. The parts that made his name are men who cannot afford to show what they feel and show it anyway, in the set of a jaw or the length of a pause, and the profiles all reach for the same words: restraint, dignity, vulnerability in characters not usually allowed it. He can hold two contradictory things in one face and let us decide which is true. In Don't Look Up (2021) he is Dr Teddy Oglethorpe, the third scientist on the flight to Washington, and while Leonardo DiCaprio sweats and Jennifer Lawrence fumes he is the one who has plainly been in rooms like this before. We laughed, properly, in that White House corridor, and it took us a while to see that the laugh needed him: a joke about nobody listening only works if one person on screen is not shouting. It is a film we did not much care for, and he is one of the reasons the first act is the best of it.

He is not an actor for a script that wants noise, and Adam McKay's does, so after the first act we found ourselves waiting for him to come back. That is the recurring trouble with his career: films keep finding room for him in the corner and not in the middle. He has said that "It's called 'playing' for a reason," and it shows; there is no strain in him. More than two decades in, one lead. Someone should give him another, and then get out of the way.