Barney Thomason

Barney Thomason is a former army sniper, a quiet and strange man with a stammering, sing-song way of talking that unsettles everyone around him. Brought into the Shelby orbit as hired muscle with a rifle, he seems harmless until he is asked to work, and then he is anything but.

Cosmo Jarvis builds Barney out of tics and stillness rather than menace, so the character reads as childlike right up until the moment his profession reasserts itself. That gap between manner and capability is the whole performance, and it makes every scene he's in feel quietly dangerous.