Waking up before the alarm goes off can be irritating, especially when there’s still another 90 years to go until you need to get out of bed. This is the situation in which Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt find themselves in the new science-fiction adventure Passengers, when they are roused prematurely by a system malfunction a quarter of the way into their journey through deep space. At least there is one thing on board their spacecraft that will assuage any intergalactic disorientation: an offbeat British character actor.

In this instance, it’s Michael Sheen, who provides drinks and gentle banter in a sleek, deserted bar. A pan down to the nuts-and-bolts of this bartender’s lower half reveals that he happens to be an automaton, which explains how he glides so effortlessly between the optics and the countertop without spilling a drop. Perhaps among the branches of his family tree, or the microchips of his motherboard, there is a connection to other British robots in fantasy cinema — the sinister Ian Holm in Alien, Jude Law as the slick Gigolo Joe in AI: Artificial Intelligence, the urbane Michael Fassbender in Prometheus (who is Irish-German, British-trained), or the Star Wars stalwart C-3PO, played by Anthony Daniels as a tin version of Tom Courtenay from The Dresser. No matter how remote the reaches of the galaxy, there is usually a kooky or creepy Brit there to accentuate the peculiarity of an unfamiliar world. In the most extreme case, Alien 3, there’s an entire planet populated by the bleeders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Droll droid … C-3PO, played by Anthony Daniels, in Star Wars Photograph: AP

The monopoly that British actors have on memorable villainous roles in US cinema is well-known (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Alan Rickman in Die Hard) but this country’s performers are hired by Hollywood to do more than just the occasional bit of moustache-twirling. Most big-budget US spectaculars, whether they’re set on other worlds or our own, need someone lower down the cast to supply those idiosyncrasies that tend to be ironed out of performers once they advance to the A-list; it’s the seasoning necessary for the main meal. In one snaggle-toothed smile, unpredictable vowel or tremor of cowardice, a Brit can offset the blemishless swagger of the leads without undermining them. Witness how much more heroic Tom Cruise looks whenever he is placed next to Simon Pegg in the Mission: Impossible movies. The function is to point up the lead’s perfection, in much the same way that the presence of a gay character reinforces the hero’s heterosexuality.



Sheen has form in this sort of part. He provided the eccentricity quota in Tron Legacy, where he played a cane-twirling nightclub owner styled as a walking Bowie compendium; a kind of Thin White Ziggy Sane. In that movie, he seemed all set to be the villain of the piece, and Sheen hammed it up accordingly, referring to the fetching hero, Garrett Hedlund, as “Pretty miss” and strutting around to Daft Punk, only for the film to give him his P45 after one scene.



For the star to truly shine, the character actor must be standing nearby

If Passengers has any sense it will let him come along for more of the ride. After all, stars need people like him. How would we know that Lawrence and Pratt really are all they’re cracked up to be if there were no oddballs like Sheen against whom to compare them? For the star to truly shine, the character actor must be standing somewhere nearby. Occasionally the two categories overlap, though it almost never happens with British actors in Hollywood; only the silver-spooners, such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne and Hugh Grant, graduate to above-the-title billing. The likes of Tom Hardy, Fassbender and Daniel Day-Lewis (memorably described by the comedian Adam Riches as “the greatest actor never to have appeared in anyone’s favourite films”) are character actors who just happen to have achieved stardom.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A kind of Thin White Ziggy Sane’ … Michael Sheen in Tron: Legacy Photograph: Allstar/Disney

Americans cherish the sort of training that is commonplace with British actors. Last year, Michael Douglas noted a disparity in technique between the performers of the two countries. “There’s a crisis in young American actors right now,” he said. “Everyone’s much more image conscious than they are about actually playing the part. Clearly, it breaks down on two fronts. In Britain they take their training seriously while in the States we’re going through a sort of social media image conscious thing rather than formal training.”

Eddie Marsan, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent … all have benefited from the unlikely conveyor belt that stretches directly from the sets of Mike Leigh movies and into the studio backlots of Los Angeles. There’s something to be said for a distinctive, lived-in face that has seen more than just the inside of casting rooms and orthodontists’ offices. Long before Steven Spielberg struck up a fruitful working relationship with Mark Rylance on Bridge of Spies and The BFG, that film-maker championed Pete Postlethwaite, whom he cast in Amistad and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, as the best actor in the world.

Pete Postlethwaite's acting tutor said he had a face like a stone archway

Postlethwaite, who died in 2011, liked to joke that what Spielberg really meant was: “Pete thinks he’s the best actor in the world.” But then he wasn’t short on humility, or an understanding of his own oddness. In his autobiography, A Spectacle of Dust, he cheerfully recalls various attempts to describe his distinctive face. One critic said he resembled an unmade bed or a bag of spanners. An acting tutor, who waived Postlethwaite’s fees at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, remarked on his “face like a fucking stone archway”.



In the lack of pressure to conform to a physical ideal, the character actor has a freedom unavailable to those on the A-list, and a British accent in Hollywood can only contribute to the aura of strangeness. “I have friends who are leading men,” Eddie Marsan has said, “and they’re only ever allowed to play leading men of a certain type. But as a character actor, there’s a wider variety of projects available.” That subtle difference can be evident even as the character actor is doing his bit and making the stars seem more glamorous. When Sheen gives Pratt and Lawrence the once-over in Passengers, his knowing smile seems to say: “Although you command a fee many times greater than mine, I enjoy a creative freedom that is now precluded for you by your innumerable agents, managers, publicists and wranglers. Another drink?”

