Mark Antony

Julius Caesar's most trusted officer, Mark Antony is a soldier of enormous appetite: for wine, for women, for power, for loyalty repaid in blood if need be. Brash and physically fearless, he moves through Rome's political games with a soldier's contempt for subtlety, more comfortable in a brothel or on a battlefield than in the Senate.

Purefoy plays him as pure appetite made charming, a man who treats seduction and violence with the same easy grin, and the show lets that charisma do real political work rather than just decorate it. He's funniest when he's most dangerous, and the performance never lets you forget both are true at once.