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There are probably a lot of benefits to being a fancily trained British (/Irish/Scottish/Welsh) actor. Like, even if you're not giving it your all, your posh accent is all it takes to sell your performance. Or, that your presence in any American production immediately classes up the joint. Or, that you belong to the last ethnic race on Earth that can still be considered sexy even if you're extremely pale and have terrible teeth. What is probably the biggest drawback? Goddamn period pictures. Every film or miniseries adaptation of a Victorian novel, your agent's getting a call. Don't look good in an embroidered waistcoat? Tough. And it's not only movies set in Britain's (/Ireland's/Scotland's/Wales's) past that you're expected to suit up for; a U.K. accent is expected in The Past, regardless of whether we're watching the exploits of folk living in long-ago Greece, Russia, or Mexico. This sort of thing just isn't expected of America's actors aged forty and above (which is kind of a pity; Tom Berenger could probably really rock a toga). But casting directors apparently expect that if British actors cut their teeth on Titus Andronicus, we might as well get one of them to play Rasputin, too.

Ciarán Hinds is no stranger to the vagaries that plague the British (fine -- in his case, Irish) character actor. We're talking about a man who's played both Charlotte Brontê's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Captain Wentworth. And as for using a British accent to play non-British roles...see his Frenchman in The Phantom Of The Opera, his Greek in Jason And The Argonauts, and his Indian (...we're guessing? "Ashwattaman"?) in The Mahabharata. Giant heads of the kind Hinds lugs around every day are not known to belong to any particular nationality.

Though we're not quite prepared to name him the year's breakout Hey! It's That Guy!, 2005 did find Hinds's stock going up as a result of two big roles. First, he portrayed poor old doomed-ass Julius Caesar in HBO's Rome. Although no one really needed to have read spoilers to predict what lay ahead for Hinds's character, he was fun to watch as a plummy, personable dictator who got it on with a lot of babes, waged actual war from tents stocked with extremely heavy-looking desks and chaises, got into bitchy spats with his favourite slave, and generally lived large, right up until...you know, he wasn't living anymore. Plus Hinds had the distinction of being the most famous British actor prancing around Cinecitta in The Bombay Company's finest bedsheets.

Caesar, while very nicely performed by Hinds, wasn't the kind of character one gets very warm or fuzzy about (unless you're Brutus -- and even then, apparently your feelings end up being quite complicated), so we were pleased to take in Hinds's other big role of '05: Carl in Munich. Yes, it's another period picture, but at least it's from a period where telephones were in common use, and at least Hinds gets to do a non-British accent (as a German Jew). In the Israeli government's crack team of terrorist hunters, Carl is the crime-scene cleaner -- which requires him only to pocket a couple of spent shell casings and maybe smudge out a footprint or two; that was kind of a much easier job back before DNA testing, apparently. Carl wears horn-rimmed glasses and a fedora and gets all the best lines ("If I can't kvetch, I can't do my job") and when he leaves the story, it gets a lot darker and less jaunty and glamorous. This pop-culture commentator thought she was through adopting fictional surrogate grandpas after Lost's Locke, but upon meeting Carl, I had to make room for one more.