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Paul Bettany is the third lead in Transcendence and, if you've seen the trailer, it's no spoiler to reveal that he's basically the film's hero. Especially considering its plotline involves Johnny Depp's character (Will Caster) getting uploaded to a computer and kinda taking over the world. Bettany plays Depp's buddy Max, who realizes the dangerous implications of computer-Will and eventually works to bring him down. He does his usual terrific work — he's forceful and intense without ever feeling over-the-top, and surprisingly grounded in a film that has a lot of trouble with groundedness.

This should be no surprise, because for the last 15 years, Bettany has been one of the most consistently brilliant actors working, yet also one of the most ignored; plugging away either as the third lead of mediocre films, a voice actor in Hollywood's biggest franchise, or as the star of weird action B-movies. He's by no means an unhappy man — he earns a consistent living in Hollywood and by all accounts lives a very happy life in Brooklyn with wife Jennifer Connelly and their three kids. (One is hers from a previous relationship). But why did his career never go nova? Here's a look back at how Bettany ended up where he is.

Beginnings

Like many Brits, Bettany started young and on the stage, appearing in a lot of Royal Shakespeare Company productions and then graduating to BBC TV period dramas and tiny mid-'90s UK indie films, like Bent and The Land Girls. His breakout role in that world was the largely unseen and criminally underrated Paul McGuigan 2000 crime drama Gangster No. 1, where Bettany played the younger version of Malcolm McDowell's titular character. Made at the height of the British crime revival (which was sparked by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), Gangster No. 1 is more artful and cleverly violent than the films it was jumbled in with, and Bettany did great work with the difficult task of imitating McDowell at his most demented.

Breakthrough

Gangster No. 1 was enough to get Bettany cast in two crucial supporting roles that made his Hollywood bones. He's indisputably the shining jewel of the super-fun medieval comic romp A Knight's Tale, essaying the role of Geoffrey Chaucer as a kind of bombastic wrestling emcee (if you haven't seen this Heath Ledger vehicle, which puts a bizarre modern twist on… jousting, then rent the damn thing right away). A Knight's Tale came out in the summer of 2001 and was a cult hit from the second it was released, and nothing more, but Bettany followed that with A Beautiful Mind that December, playing the vital role of John Nash's (Russell Crowe) best friend Charles, who turns out to be a figment of his imagination.