Dwayne Johnson. Bruce Willis. Milla Jovovich. Jackie Chan. There are some names forever linked to action movies. These stars have shot a thousand bad guys, blown up a thousand cars and escaped a thousand death traps.
Other actors, not so much. We're unlikely to see Sir Michael Gambon take down the Russian Mafia armed only with a machete any time soon. But that doesn't mean that you always know who's going to come running out of that burning building with an assault rifle tucked under each arm. Here are some stars we never expected to kick so much ass.
1. Helen Mirren – Red
We were disappointed that Dame Helen didn't so much as execute a three-point turn in Fast & Furious 8 – let alone a high-speed chase – but we'll always have her stellar performance as a retired assassin in 2010's Red and its sequel. The films were so-so, but the image of Mirren wielding a machine gun will stay with us for the rest of our lives.
2. Michael Cera – Scott Pilgrim vs the World
Arrested Development's Michael Cera spent much of his career typecast as an awkward nerd, but in Edgar Wright's comicbook adaptation Scott Pilgrim, he played, well, an awkward nerd with fighting superpowers. Cera fights his way through the seven evil exes of his girlfriend Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) using only his feet, fists... and a magic sword he pulls out of his heart.
3. Colin Firth – Kingsman: The Secret Service
Colin Firth is best known as a British gent – a figurative and sometimes literal Mr Darcy. In Kingsman, he took a leaf out of Cera's book by combining the familiar – a nice suit and good manners – with the life of a lethal superspy. The gross-out berserker church battle above is not something we ever expected from the one-time King George VI.
4. Adrien Brody – Predators
Adrien Brody became the youngest Best Actor Oscar winner at 29 when he starred in Roman Polanski's The Pianist, and has stuck to more cerebral fare since (including a ton of Wes Anderson movies). Imagine our surprise when he turned up as a musclebound ex-military type in Predators, even beheading one of the titular alien hunters with an axe. And when did he become such a total beefcake?
5. Emily Blunt – Edge of Tomorrow
Emily Blunt is one of Britain's biggest stars, but it's her comedy and drama roles that come to mind first, in the likes of The Devil Wears Prada and The Young Victoria. In Edge of Tomorrow she subverts everything including Tom Cruise himself by playing the legendary military badass to her co-star's callow publicist.
6. Saoirse Ronan – Hanna
Irish actress Saoirse Ronan has made a career of playing complex, sensitive roles and earning Oscar nominations for them (Lady Bird recently earned the 23-year-old her third). But in Hanna, she mixed things up by playing a young girl trained from birth to be a deadly assassin who will definitely kill you. (Cate Blanchett deserves an honourable mention for this film too, though we already knew that she can do anything.)
7. Felicity Jones – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Felicity Jones's acting roots couldn't be more traditionally British. She voiced Emma Grundy on The Archers for ten years. She took a break from acting to go to Oxford. She was in The Worst Witch! She starred in a romantic drama with Eddie Redmayne! The last place we expected to find her was gunning down Stormtroopers as Jyn Erso in Star Wars' grittiest entry to date, the bleak war drama that is Rogue One.
