Paddy Considine

Considine's screen career kicked off in earnest with A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), his first collaboration with director Shane Meadows — a partnership that would define a significant stretch of his early work (Wikipedia). The following year he played Alfie in Paweł Pawlikowski's Last Resort (2000), and by the early 2000s he was stacking up credits fast: 24 Hour Party People (2002), In America (2003), My Summer of Love (2004), and Dead Man's Shoes (2004), the last of which earned him the 2005 Empire Award for Best British Actor and a BIFA nomination for Best Actor (Wikipedia). That's a remarkable run across four years, and it established him as a fixture in the kind of British independent cinema that actually has something to say. He didn't stop at acting. His short film Dog Altogether (2007) — which he wrote and directed — won the BAFTA for Best Short Film and the Silver Lion for Best Short Film at the Venice Film Festival that same year (Wikipedia). The feature-length version, Tyrannosaur (2011), won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer. He also directed and starred in Journeyman, a film about a boxer dealing with a traumatic brain injury (Wikipedia). These aren't side projects — they're the work of someone who genuinely can't separate storytelling from performance. On television, he's led Pu-239 (2006), My Zinc Bed (2008), Red Riding (2009), Informer (2018), and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2013–2014), with supporting turns in Peaky Blinders (2016), The Outsider (2020), and The Third Day (2020) (Wikipedia). His most visible recent role — King Viserys I Targaryen in House of the Dragon (2022–2024) — reached a global audience that his earlier indie work never quite did. The performance, particularly in the later episodes as Viserys deteriorates physically while clinging to authority, is the kind of thing that doesn't leave you quickly. Honestly, it's some of the best work he's ever done on screen.