Tom Connolly New actors headshots at the studio, downtown Los Angeles

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There is a particular pleasure in photographing an actor who has spent time in the eighteenth century. Tom Connolly leads the feature film Love, Courage and the Battle of Bushy Run as Colonel Henry Bouquet, the Swiss-born British Army officer whose victory at Bushy Run opened the road to the relief of Fort Pitt. The battle was fought, as it happens, in the first week of August, two hundred and sixty-three years ago this month. I have spent much of my career photographing the British Army, from private soldiers to field marshals, so a sitter who has carried a colonel's commission on screen arrives at the studio with rather more to talk about than most.

The critics were generous to his Bouquet, and rightly so. Lee Brown wrote that "Connolly expertly displays Bouquet's steadfast courage and resilience", while Shane A. Bassett called him "the perfect casting accomplishment as Bouquet" and the performance "brilliant". It is a role that suits the face you see in these frames: steadiness first, feeling underneath.

Tom trained at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, the ensemble founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy, and his television work reaches from Lost and Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life to his recurring role as Leander in The Chosen, which he reprises in the series' fifth season. He has twice been named Best Actor, at the Her Vision International Film Festival and at the LASFF, for his lead in the feature Sallywood. He is, in short, working, and working actors need headshots that keep pace with the work.

We made the sitting the way I make most actors headshots: one principal light, set low and close, and a sitter given permission to be still. Stillness is the whole game. A headshot is not quite a portrait. It is a casting instrument, and it must promise a performance without giving one. But the good ones are made exactly as good portraits are, by waiting for the face to settle into something true. Tom settles quickly. Six foot two, silvering in the way the camera rewards, he holds the lens the way stage-trained actors tend to: without apology.

Three changes of clothing gave us the range a casting profile needs. The tan leather jacket against the darker canvas carries his weight — the detective, the soldier out of uniform, the man who has already heard the thing you are about to tell him. The black jacket over green holds the intent frame and, a few degrees later, the smile; the smile matters, because a casting director should be able to see that the warmth is there and that it arrives honestly. The pale denim on grey is the daylight look — contemporary, unguarded, the frame that reads at speed.

The studio sits on Main Street in the Historic Core, a few minutes' walk from Pershing Square, and it was built for exactly this kind of morning: an actor, a rail of clothes, one light, and no hurry.

My portraits are held in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Royal Collection, and my sitters have included Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Patrick Stewart and Dame Judi Dench. The same light serves the working actor, because it is the oldest light there is, and it does not date. Actors headshots are photographed at the studio at 411 S Main Street, downtown Los Angeles. Details and booking are on the actors headshots page.