Alfred Molina

A booby trap killed his character before the title card in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The role paid £1,000 a week, which he needed because he had a baby coming and nothing else lined up. It took four years for anyone to see him as more than Spielberg's first casualty, when Letter to Brezhnev (1985) gave him a real role to play.

Playing Kenneth Halliwell in Prick Up Your Ears (1987), opposite Gary Oldman, got Roger Ebert calling it one of the best performances of the year. A decade later, a single scene in Boogie Nights became his calling card. He played a drug dealer in a bathrobe while Paul Thomas Anderson set off firecrackers at random to rattle the rest of the cast. He never flinched. Critics still cite it as one of the greatest one-scene performances in film.

Spider-Man 2 gave him a villain audiences actually mourned. Sony brought him back seventeen years later for No Way Home, digitally de-aged to his 2004 self. He's said Doc Ock "completely changed my life." On this one, the audience agrees.

Three Tony nominations without a win. The industry respects him enough to keep nominating him, not enough to hand him the trophy. He voiced the octopus in Netflix's Remarkably Bright Creatures and stars in The Boroughs. Retirement doesn't appear to interest him, but neither does the leading-man track.

His father was a Spanish waiter who parachuted into occupied France with British Special Operations before D-Day. His mother was an Italian cook. The son of wartime immigrants, raised in Notting Hill, doesn't sound like three-Tony-nomination material, but that's the point.

England kept casting him as "the foreign guy." He's joked he could never get a Merchant Ivory role beyond "the swarthy foreign guy who tries to make a pass at Helena Bonham Carter, or the carriage driver." Hollywood gave him more room. He spent years as caregiver to his first wife, actress Jill Gascoine, through Alzheimer's before she died in 2020. He married Jennifer Lee, director of Frozen, in 2021. Nobody who cast him as "the carriage driver" saw any of this coming.