Robert Kazinsky

In Star Trek: Section 31 (2025) Robert Kazinsky spends the film inside a walking suit of armour, playing a man called Zeph who is given one joke on arrival and makes it again every few minutes. In Pacific Rim (2013) he is Chuck Hansen, the Australian son whose hostility to the hero is explained in one line and resolved in another. This is the shape of his Hollywood career so far: a large, physically capable actor cast for his shoulders and then given a sentence.

It was not always so. He arrived through British television, first as Casper Rose in Dream Team (2005–2006) and then as Sean Slater in EastEnders from 2006 to 2009, a troubled and often violent character he played across more than 250 episodes. That is where his reputation was made, and it was made on the thing soap does best: an arc that takes years, in which a man's temper is given seasons rather than minutes. He has gone back to Slater more than once, in 2019 and again from 2021 to 2022, and a permanent return has been announced for 2026.

The American work began in 2013 with Pacific Rim for Guillermo del Toro and a recurring part as Macklyn Warlow in True Blood. Then came the orc Orgrim Doomhammer in Warcraft (2016), a voice and motion-capture performance in which his own face never appears, a biker in Captain Marvel (2019), The Gray Man (2022) and Section 31. The films get bigger and the footprints get smaller. What he brings to them is physical commitment: in Pacific Rim he looks like a man who has trained for the fight, and del Toro's film, which builds its robots with more care than its people, asks him for that and nothing further.

Watching Zeph clank through Section 31, we felt something closer to sympathy than irritation, which is not what the film intended. He has said Star Trek is his biggest single fandom and that he knows every episode by heart, and here is the dream job: a costume, a catchphrase, and a heist cut so fast that nobody inside it gets a moment. We were bored by the repeats, as the film deserved, but the boredom was not his doing. Neither film gives him room to act. Both give him room to stand.

The evidence that he can act is in Walford, where the camera stays on a face long enough to watch it change. Hollywood has used him as furniture with a temper. Until someone there writes him a second line, the return to EastEnders is not a retreat. It is where the work is.