Alfred Molina, the supporting actor Netflix asked to lead

The character actor you recognise and rarely name. The face that has been a Mexican muralist, a Belgian detective, a panicked French mayor, a heroin-dealing pornographer, a Marvel super-villain — Alfred Molina has been every nationality and every register, and in each role he has done the actor’s vanishing act so cleanly that audiences leave the cinema knowing the face and forgetting the name. The pattern is finally being asked to break. The Boroughs, the first major Duffer Brothers project after Stranger Things, opens on Netflix with Molina as Sam Cooper — the character the entire ensemble revolves around, the show’s sole lead-actor Emmy submission. This is how a career-long second banana becomes the lead.

Sam Raimi once put it bluntly: Molina is great in just about everything, but he disappears so completely into roles that you forget where you’ve seen him before. Molina has said the same thing back, with a shrug. “When you’re kind of my size and look the way I do, leading man romantic leads aren’t going to come your way.” It is a piece of self-knowledge dressed as a wisecrack, and it has been the architecture of a forty-five-year career.

His father Esteban arrived in London from Murcia after parachuting into France with the Special Operations Executive before D-Day. His mother Giovanna left Italy after the war. They settled in working-class Notting Hill among other immigrants from across Europe, the West Indies, and Africa, and the household stayed multilingual: both Spanish and Italian were spoken at home, and the boy who would later disappear into accents from Mexico City to St. Petersburg was already absorbing them. He attended Cardinal Manning, a secondary-modern Catholic school in West London. The decision to act came at nine, after seeing Spartacus. His father, a waiter, thought it was a phase that would pass; Molina admitted decades later that the disappointment never quite went away.

It did not pass. He joined the National Youth Theatre in 1969, then went up to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He anglicised Alfredo to Alfred at twenty-one because his first agent told him to. The Royal Shakespeare Company and the West End built the foundation — an Olivier nomination for Oklahoma! in 1980, Petruchio at Stratford in The Taming of the Shrew, the working c.v. of a serious stage actor — before Steven Spielberg cast him in his first film. He has a brief, vivid scene at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark: live tarantulas on his back while the director shouted “Look scared, Alfred” from off-camera. He did not have to act.

The film breakthrough came later, as Joe Orton’s lover-and-eventual-killer Kenneth Halliwell in Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears. The 1990s mostly belonged to British television, with the lead in El C.I.D. and a near-miss casting as Arnold Rimmer in Red Dwarf, before American directors discovered what British directors already knew: he could play anyone. Paul Thomas Anderson cast him as the unhinged drug dealer in Boogie Nights and the medical-equipment salesman in Magnolia. Lasse Hallström put him in Chocolat as the small-town French mayor whose Lent fast becomes a war on a sweet shop. He gained weight to play Diego Rivera in Frida — Salma Hayek’s twelve-year passion project about Frida Kahlo — and earned the first of two BAFTA nominations.

Sam Raimi saw Frida with his wife and decided Molina should be Doctor Octopus. Spider-Man 2 turned a stage actor with a thirty-year filmography into a Marvel villain, and his Otto Octavius — a tragic scientist seduced by his own invention rather than a snarling bad guy — was much of the reason the film is still considered the high-water mark of pre-MCU superhero cinema. Seventeen years later, Spider-Man: No Way Home brought him back, digitally de-aged to his 2004 self, retconning Otto’s death. The most famous version of Alfred Molina, somehow, ended up being a younger Alfred Molina.

Stage work continued in parallel. He was Tevye in the 2004 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, Mark Rothko in John Logan’s Red in 2009 (Drama Desk Award, Tony nomination), and Yvan in Yasmina Reza’s Art before that, his Broadway debut. In 2024 he returned to Broadway as Professor Serebryakov in Lila Neugebauer’s Uncle Vanya, opposite Steve Carell — at seventy, taking on Chekhov’s most exhausted intellectual.

The strange fact about Molina’s career is the gap between the consensus on his talent and the level of stardom that consensus has produced. Three Pines, Amazon’s adaptation of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels, was supposed to give him the prestige-streaming lead his stage c.v. had long earned; Amazon cancelled it after one season in 2023, citing its own commercial logic rather than the reception, and the rest of Penny’s enormous crime series went unfilmed. The Boroughs is the second time a streamer has asked him to anchor a series. It is not yet certain it will be the first time it sticks.

He paints — his canvases have shown in galleries — and has advocated for HIV/AIDS research since the 1990s. He was married to the actress and novelist Jill Gascoine, sixteen years his senior, from 1986 until her death from Alzheimer’s in April 2020; she had been ill for a decade and had moved to long-term care after he could no longer manage her at home. He married the screenwriter and Frozen director Jennifer Lee in August 2021, in a small backyard ceremony in California.

The Boroughs premieres on Netflix on 21 May 2026. He is also among the cast of When We Get There, currently in post-production. The actor who spent four decades being recognised and then forgotten in the car park is, on paper, a leading man at seventy-two. Whether the audience finally attaches the name to the face is a question for May.