Rory Williams

Rory Williams is a nurse in the sleepy village of Leadworth, engaged to Amy Pond and quietly used to coming second to the imaginary friend she's never quite let go of. He's kind, a little anxious, easily flustered, and endlessly patient with a fiancée who still talks about a raggedy man in a blue box.

He starts as the punchline — the sensible boyfriend nobody notices next to a time-travelling stranger — and Arthur Darvill plays that indignity with such open-faced sincerity that it stops being funny and starts being moving. His decency never wavers, which is rarer and harder to make interesting than heroics.