Rafe Spall

 

I first noticed British actor Rafe Spall in The Big Short (2015), in which he played the ebulliently optimistic gourmand and stock trader Danny Moses -- one of the few likeable people in that terrific but cynical film.

In Hugo Blick's outstanding Amazon Prime miniseries The English, Spall, son of the celebrated English character actor Timothy Spall, plays the most despicable person among a legion of them as David Melmont, a low-born English "numbers guy" in the employ of British aristocrat and aspiring cattleman in late-19th century Wyoming Thomas Trafford, played by Tom Hughes.

As Melmont, Spall, who like his father mostly plays supporting parts in films, is a snarling, vengeful and diseased cuss whose presence is felt even when he isn't on-screen.

This poisonous figure is given ominous dimensionality through Spall's considerable gifts for inhabiting and enlivening characters. It is difficult to see any of Moses from The Big Short in the terrifying Melmont.

As Melmont, Spall is menacing both when unshaven and draped in a poncho, his grimy face and grim countenance under a dusty bowler hat on the prairie, and when he is shaved and powdered, vested and spatted, hat in hand and walking stick at his side, sitting in the parlor of an estate in the English countryside. In both instances, he is a venomous viper, whose actions ruin multiple lives while enriching himself.

I won't make the obvious comparisons to more contemporary villains.