10 Best Unsung Actors From Each Movie Genre

It takes a very specific kind of nebbish to pull off the kind of roles Robert Joy has in the past few decades, one that can appear somewhat harmless but also hide whatever darkness necessary to be a hidden serial murderer. Joy has had a long history portraying lowlives and downtrodden criminals. Even his most celebrated positive character Charlie in George Romero's Land of the Dead is still an outlaw.

Prior to Land, he had some positive roles, playing one of the Mossad agents tracking down the same terrorists that were hunted in Stephen Spielberg's Munich in a Canadian TV Movie Sword of Gideon. He started playing cold-blooded killers in earnest in Death Wish V, one of the goons to whom Charles Bronson doles out justice.

The 90s offered a slew of similar parts, including the blackmailer in Romero's The Dark Half, one of the possessed in Gregory Hoblit's Fallen and the killer in the Christopher Lambert religious thriller Resurrection.

The millennium was more of the same, but with Land and one other significant role that would finally earn him more than just passing recognition. His sadistic portrayal of Lizard, one of the mutants in Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes, is easily the most deranged in a film chock-full of bizarre turns.

Television seems to have mostly relegated him to stuffy bureaucrat and lawyer roles, but film has utilized him much more effectively.