Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias

Adrian Veidt lives alone on a vast, isolated estate, attended by servants who seem a little too eager to please. He spends his days staging elaborate experiments and pronouncements to no one in particular, clearly a man used to being the smartest person in any room. Exactly why he's there, or what he's building toward, he keeps to himself.

Jeremy Irons plays a legendary genius gone slightly, deliciously unmoored, all theatrical grandeur and dry, weary contempt for lesser minds. The show gives him a mystery box of a setting and lets him narrate his own myth with relish, and Irons makes every pompous flourish feel like a man performing for an audience that may not exist.