Pyke Edwards

Pyke Edwards moves in the orbit of Matt Mitcham's family, part of the tangle of local men whose lives are bound up with the Mitcham drug business in the small lakeside town. He's watchful and self-contained, someone whose loyalties and motives Robin Griffin has to read carefully as she digs into the disappearance at the centre of the case.

Ewen Leslie plays him with a coiled, unreadable stillness that fits the show's world of men who say little and mean more than they say. Top of the Lake thrives on ambient menace rather than exposition, and Leslie's performance supplies exactly that: a presence you can't quite place, which keeps you watching him even when the scene is ostensibly about someone else.