Victorian MVP: Mark Strong

I’ve been listening to a lot of carriage wheels on cobblestones lately, with three films set in Victorian London. And two of them feature one of my favorite actors, Mark Strong. You may not recognize his name. You may not even recognize his face because he appears different in every film. That’s not make-up; it’s acting. Here he is in the marvelous fantasy, Stardust:

He is truly astonishing in the scene shortly after, when he has to swordfight as a corpse manipulated by a sort of puppetry enchantment (trust me, it’s great). He was a silky Jordanian secret service director in “Body of Lies” (out-acting co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe) and a thug in “RocknRolla.” And now he is plays nemesis to both the teenage Queen Victoria (Sir John Conroy) and Sherlock Holmes (Lord Blackwood). It’s worth seeing both movies just to see how good Strong is when he is bad.