V.M. Varga

V.M. Varga arrives in Minnesota as a soft-spoken British businessman with rotten teeth and a bottomless supply of language, attaching himself to a parking-lot magnate's debts like a parasite finding a host. He talks in currency and paperwork, never raising his voice, always somehow already three moves ahead.

Thewlis plays him as pure appetite dressed in reasonableness — a man who has replaced hunger for food with hunger for numbers, and who will out-monologue anyone into surrender. The writing gives him philosophy instead of menace; Thewlis makes the philosophy itself the threat, delivered through those unforgettable teeth.