Stellan Skarsgård

His international breakthrough came at 45. Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) was what finally got Hollywood's attention, and what followed was a decade of American supporting roles that were often better than the films around them. Good Will Hunting, Amistad, Ronin. He was never the lead but reliably the one you remembered. He'd spent the years before at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater, training for a career in character work that didn't need anyone to call him a star.

He won the Golden Globe for Chernobyl (2019) playing Soviet deputy prime minister Boris Shcherbina with grim, committed authority. Then came Andor, where he plays Luthen Rael, a rebel spy who runs every conversation he's in. In January 2026, he won another Golden Globe, Best Supporting Actor for Sentimental Value, a Norwegian film that premiered at Cannes to a 19-minute standing ovation and took the Grand Prix. He did most of this while recovering from a 2022 stroke that forced him to use an earpiece and a prompter on set. The work keeps getting better. The obstacles keep getting bigger.

He was considered for the Tarzan role in 1984's Greystoke, and 32 years later his son Alexander played the character in The Legend of Tarzan. Bill plays Pennywise. The family runs on horror and mythology. Six of his eight children are actors, and he speaks five languages, which at some point stops being a list of facts and starts being a character description. He's appeared in six Lars von Trier films, but his closest collaborator is Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, of whom he has said they're like 'an old married couple' with 'separation anxiety.'