Cillian Murphy

Cillian Murphy plays Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders, making silence as useful as dialogue. Tommy is a man who often lets an opponent finish talking before revealing whether he has listened, and Murphy's restraint gives those meetings much of their tension. His performance holds together the family drama and the increasingly ambitious criminal business across six seasons and The Immortal Man.

His film work offers very different uses of that intensity. 28 Days Later puts him in the middle of a devastated Britain; The Wind That Shakes the Barley gives him a more intimate historical conflict. Christopher Nolan cast him in Batman Begins, Inception and Dunkirk before giving him the lead in Oppenheimer, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Tommy remains an especially rewarding role because the composure is never the whole man. Murphy leaves room for exhaustion and uncertainty beneath the confidence, without having to announce either.