OOH IT'S THEM! MAR.

22, 2021

The 32 Greatest Character Actors Working Today We

asked critics and Hollywood creators: Which
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supporting players make everything better?

By Nate Jones
Entries by Abbey Bender, Monica Castillo, Jen Chaney, Robert Daniels, Bilge Ebiri, Marya E. Gates, Nate Jones,
Iana Murray, Keith Phipps, Joe Reid, Helen Shaw, Brian Tallerico, Kathryn VanArendonk, Katie Walsh, and
Alissa Wilkinson

Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photos by Shutterstock, HBO, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Netflix, Newmarket Films, A24,
New Line Cinema, FX, Sony Pictures Releasing, Paramount Pictures, Gramercy Pictures, Sony Pictures Television and Focus Features

s many have noted, a small but significant loss we’ve all faced during quarantine has been the
disappearance of the casual acquaintance. People like your roommate’s high-school friend, the
A
neighbor who took the same subway line, the co-worker you always saw in the kitchen.
These were not deep relationships, but even so, there was a comforting familiarity in
encountering the same faces on a semi-regular basis.

Fortunately, while those people who played such treasured peripheral roles in our lives have
for the moment (a year and counting) gone away, we’ve been able to turn to the people playing
treasured peripheral roles in entertainment to pick up the slack. In the era of Peak TV and the
subsequent streaming boom, character actors are working more than ever before — and since
many of us have little else to do but stare at our screens, it’s precisely these performers who
have filled the gap left by our secondary bonds. When your social circle has shrunk down to
your immediate household, the glimmer of recognition that comes from spotting a familiar
face in a movie provides more dopamine than it probably should.

That’s why this year more so than ever before, as awards season trains its spotlight once again
on actors who are accustomed to such gold-tinted attention, we felt it was vital to properly
recognize those ubiquitous yet under-acknowledged performers whose regular appearances on
our devices were one of the few joys we were afforded during lockdown. We’ll be showing our
appreciation with a week’s worth of articles devoted to hard-working bit players, beginning
here with the results of an industrywide survey we conducted to answer one simple
question: who are the most memorable character actors working today? To find out, we polled
nearly 60 directors, showrunners, casting directors, and critics — and when we tallied the
results, 32 names had emerged from a field of more than 300 suggestions.

Before we get into the list, some housekeeping: What makes an actor a character actor? Try to
pin it down, and you’ll go mad wading through counterexamples. The most obvious definition
is that a character actor is not a lead. (Frequently they’re not even the fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-
billed in the credits, either.) Except that sometimes, aging stars will do their best work in
character roles, while other character actors turn out to be stars-in-waiting. A character actor
is someone who is known for small parts, but with the abundance of cable and streaming
projects, many of them now occasionally work as co-leads, albeit in little-discussed series.
Then there are the philosophical questions: Is a character actor someone who disappears into
a role, like Bill Camp, or someone who has a distinctive presence, like Colman Domingo? Yes
and yes.

There’s a long-held notion that a character actor is someone who’s simply not attractive
enough to be a lead, an idea so ingrained that it even made its way into the Wikipedia
definition. A superficial scan of this list will quickly disabuse readers of such a belief, though
there admittedly often is an element of an actor’s face that marks the person as a character
actor, a seasoning you won’t find on the CW. As Camp told me when I interviewed him and his
wife, fellow character actor Elizabeth Marvel: “I played a lot more leads when I was younger.
But I look like Chet Baker now.” (Camp later clarified that he loves Chet Baker and was not
trying to insult him.) The best character actors take ordinariness and make it highly specific.
Think of the way Beth Grant has honed the suburban busybody to its sharpest points, or how,
with just one sigh, Michael Stuhlbarg serves up the foibles of the intelligentsia on a silver
platter.

Character actors often have a sense of timelessness to them as well. While an A-lister’s stock
may rise and fall with the fashions of the day, a character actor can stay booked and busy for
decades. For a performer, the title brings remarkable job security, especially for female
character actors, who have a different relationship with the perils of Hollywood sexism than
their more famous peers. “Often women my age are reaching a point where it’s time to find
another direction to go in,” Marvel told me, “unless you’re a character actor. And then it’s
awesome, because there’s so much fascinating work.”

While any sort of conclusive definition of a character actor is likely impossible to achieve, to
produce this list we nevertheless needed to set some firm boundaries. We came up with three
rules governing inclusion, which were shared with our survey respondents:

➼ The Jenkins Rule: If a performer has been nominated for an Oscar, that performer is
ineligible.

➼ The Dowd-Martindale Rule: If a performer has won a lead or supporting-actor Emmy,

that performer is ineligible. (Winners of an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor are
permitted.)

➼ The Hahn Rule: If a performer currently works primarily as a lead, that performer is
ineligible.

Also, the performer had to be alive, but we didn’t know who to name that one after. Too many
options!

Got all that? Let’s get to the names*.

Hiam Abbass
First role: La Nuit Miraculeuse (1989)

You Know Her From: Succession, Ramy, The Visitor

 Be Sure to Check Out: Lemon Tree, The Syrian Bride,
Satin Rouge

The complexity of defining a “character actor” is on full

display when considering the Palestinian actress and
director Abbass, who is practically a household name in the
Middle East and a revered figure on the international-film-
festival circuit (she’s even served on a Cannes jury). And
certainly, a performer who can simultaneously portray
Succession’s enigmatic and fascinating Marcia Roy and
Ramy’s filterless matriarch Maysa is nothing if not versatile.

Although Abbass frequently appears in smaller parts in high-profile films in the West — such
as Munich, in which she played the headstrong wife of a Palestinian diplomat targeted for
assassination (and on which she also served as a consultant), or Blade Runner 2049, as the
leader of a replicant freedom movement — she has been a devastating presence in films by
international auteurs such as Palestine’s Hany Abu Assad and Israel’s Eran Riklis. In the
former’s Oscar-nominated Paradise Now (the first Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee from
Palestine — controversial at the time, in 2006, for all the reasons that you’d expect), she lent a
complicated sense of humanity to the mother of a suicide bomber.

Arguably her greatest roles have come from Riklis, however: In The Syrian Bride (2005),
Abbass conveyed outrage both righteous and comic as the headstrong, feminist sister of a
young woman whose imminent, cross-border wedding to a Syrian pop star is buried in red
tape. In the same director’s Lemon Tree (2008), she blended defiance, grief, and bewilderment
as a Palestinian widow trying to preserve her family’s lemon grove from destruction by the
Israeli Defense minister, who has moved in next door. The latter is truly one of the great
performances of its decade and rightfully won her a number of awards all around the world.

Becky Ann Baker

First Screen Role: The Protector (1985)

You Know Her From: Girls, Freaks and Geeks

Be Sure to Check Out: A Simple Plan, Social Distance

 Becky Ann Baker has played cops and judges, attorneys and
teachers, authors and nurses. But she’s probably best known
for portraying moms.

For another actor, this might be a bad thing. The “mom

part” is often an underwritten, bland, or naggy role that an
older woman is pigeonholed into playing. But Baker, who has been amassing screen credits for
more than 35 years, started to register higher on the public radar because of the dimension
and emotional depth she brought to maternal characters.

As Jean Weir on the sadly short-lived Freaks and Geeks, she is the classic nice mom who is
super-supportive of her kids and always striving to do the things that good mothers are
supposed to do. But with Baker playing Jean, the faintest wisps of melancholy trail her
through the rooms of her suburban Michigan home. Baker makes it clear in almost every
episode of that wonderful series that Jean is a nester who dreads the idea of her own being
empty.

As Loreen Horvath, mother of Lena Dunham’s Hannah on Girls, Baker is a much different
kind of mom. She’s blunt and sometimes self-involved (like mother, like daughter). In one of
the final episodes, “Gummies,” Baker is onscreen for just a handful of minutes. But as a woman
now split from her husband, forced to live alone, and prone to scarfing down cannabis gummy
worms to numb the pain, she is bitter and sad, funny and a big ol’ relatable mess. Her
performance is one of the things you remember about that episode, years later.

The common denominator in all of Baker’s performances is the sturdiness with which her
characters carry themselves, even the softer, sometimes insecure ones. From the grief-stricken,
enraged wife in the 1998 movie A Simple Plan to the wife in quarantine who wants more out of
life in the recent pandemic-set Social Distance — in which she stars opposite real-life husband
Dylan Baker — Baker breathes life again and again into women determined to persist,
something she has done for decades.

Bill Camp
First role: Freddy’s Nightmares (1989)

You Know Him From: The Night Of, The Queen’s Gambit,
The Outsider
 Be Sure to Check Out: News of the World, Dark Waters,
Wildlife

Bill Camp looks equally at home no matter where you put

him. Whatever the genre, time period, or character type, he
brings with him a believable, undeniable weight. When a
Bill Camp character enters a scene, it feels like that person
existed before the cameras caught him. His power is in how
much he makes his characters, and the projects around them, more tactile and believable. He
told Variety in 2018, “I have the greatest job in the world, because I show up to do my job, but
I’m really just sort of living my life as I go. I think it’s crucial for actors to have full lives outside
of acting.” (Camp, you may not be surprised to learn, has also worked as a mechanic and a
cook.)

Camp’s full life anchors the drama of The Queen’s Gambit, in which he takes a character that
could have felt merely functional and grounds him with a subtle kindness that comes with a
lifetime of experience. He doesn’t get much dialogue, but it’s in the way his face perks up ever
so slightly when he senses he’s sitting with a legitimate child prodigy or the worry that crosses
it when he realizes her road ahead.

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 The Queen’s Gambit is only the latest. Wherever he goes, he imbues his roles with wants,
needs, and addictions that are reflected not through dialogue but body language. Look at him
in Molly’s Game, and you can sense this man’s coiled addiction in every muscle in his body. He
brings a world-weariness to his tragic character in Dark Waters, finding a physical gravity that
amplifies the human cost of corporate malfeasance. He turns what could have been merely a
lothario “other guy” role in Wildlife into something heartfelt by being genuine in every
moment. Just watch the way he listens — you can see him hear the people around him. It’s the
kind of skill that elevates what could just be another member of the cast into the kind of
character actor audiences can’t help but notice. (Little surprise, then, that he was our top vote-
getter, appearing on 20 percent of surveys.)

Jennifer Coolidge
First role: Seinfeld (1993)

You Know Her From: American Pie, Best in Show, Legally

Blonde, the “Hi” video

Be Sure to Check Out: Gentleman Broncos, Bad

Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Promising Young
Woman

Jennifer Coolidge might be the consummate character

actor, even if in ways she’s transcended the title. In 1999, the
term “MILF” was popularized by the teen sex comedy
tore/Shutterstock
American Pie, a descriptor for the sexually vivacious
character she played known as “Stifler’s Mom.” While that role ushered in an era of cougar
fever onscreen, Coolidge is so, so much more than that. Yes, many of her most famous roles are
bimbo-adjacent, from the soup-loving trophy wife Sherri Ann in Christopher Guest’s Best in
Show to hapless manicurist Paulette in Legally Blonde. But the Groundlings-trained comedian
infuses these oft-maligned side characters with a sense of humanity, sly intelligence, and
absurdity, making each iconic in their own right. Her performances of these archetypical
blondes, starting with a bit part as “Hottie Police Officer” opposite ex-boyfriend Chris Kattan
in A Night at the Roxbury to the Botox-obsessed Fiona in A Cinderella Story are at once a
send-up and subversion of these stereotypes.

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Coolidge’s work is deceptively layered and her improvisational skills unimpeachable (as one of
Guest’s regular players), but it seemed to take a long time for her comedic genius to be fully
recognized by mainstream audiences, who may have wondered if she was even acting at all. No
other actor does what Coolidge can do so well, because she’s so committed to the bit; it often
seems she slips into character during press appearances. That persona allows Coolidge to
surprise audiences when she tries something new, like the dramatic performance she gave in
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in 2009.

Coolidge hasn’t stopped experimenting in her career, trying stand-up, doing voice-over work
in animation, and, lately, bringing her skill to a supporting role as a sweetly mournful mother
in current Best Picture nominee Promising Young Woman. Coolidge may have cornered the
market on delightfully bonkers blondes, but make no mistake: She can do it all.

Dale Dickey
First role: The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in
Love (1995)

You Know Her From: True Blood, Unbelievable, Palm

Springs
 Be Sure to Check Out: Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace,
Blues for Willadean

In 2010, Dale Dickey gave what was probably the best

American performance of the year with her turn as the
positively demonic Merab, chain-saw-wielding matriarch
and enforcer-wife for backwoods crime boss Thump Milton in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone.
That she actually got awards attention for the role, which involved limited screen time, was a
testament to her accomplishment. Even though she’d stolen her fair share of scenes on shows
like My Name Is Earl (as “Patty the daytime hooker”) and Breaking Bad (as the prosthetic-
lesion-covered, murderous meth-addict wife of Spooge), this was a true coming-out party for
the actress; suddenly, and finally, critics knew who Dale Dickey was. Winter’s Bone was a case
of a film director knowing exactly what to do with the East Tennessee–born performer, whose
distinctive face has gotten her lots of working-class parts (cops, waitresses, gas-station
attendants, werewolf grandmothers) over the years. “From the age of 20, I was playing people
over 50,” she once told an interviewer. “My face reads mean and hard.”

It took years for Dickey to carve out a place for herself in the industry. As a struggling actor in
New York, agents often didn’t know what to do with her. She got her first break in theater
when she served brunch in New York to Steel Magnolias author Robert Harling, who decided
her southern energy was just right for his work; she eventually got a role in the Chicago
production of the play. (Dickey continues to work regularly in theater, often with southern
playwright Del Shores.) Another break came when Sean Penn cast her as a cop in his
psychological thriller The Pledge, a virtual cavalcade of notable character turns.

She’s a staggeringly good actress. Look at her turn as the sassy veteran cop RoseMarie in
Netflix’s Unbelievable, where she makes a meal out of pretty much every single line of dialogue
that she gets; she can turn the statement of a simple statistic into an existential fact. Or her
appearance as the weary but compassionate owner of a trailer park who helps the protagonists
get back on their feet in Leave No Trace, also directed by Granik. (The movies and shows don’t
even need to be all that great: She was one of the few good things about Alejandro Amenabar’s
thriller Regression.) It’s not just her tough demeanor that makes us take notice; it is her
intense unpredictability. When Dale Dickey is onscreen, anything seems possible.

Colman Domingo
First role: Around the Fire (1998)
 Where You Know Him From: Euphoria, Fear the Walking
Dead, If Beale Street Could Talk, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Be Sure to Check Out: The Big Gay Sketch Show, Passing

Strange

To follow Colman Domingo’s career over the past 15 years is

to witness a vocal transformation that rivals the likes of
Michael Caine. Domingo came to acting late, and his big
breaks didn’t occur until his late 30s. In these early roles, he
hen/HBO
was a vocal chameleon, a high-energy ham. On Logo’s Big
Gay Sketch Show, he imbued Craigslist Missed Connections with literary gravitas as Maya
Angelou and turned in a pitch-perfect Morgan Freeman, spouting inspiring non sequiturs.
(“Most of the shadows in this life are caused by standing in your own sunshine.”) His 2009
one-man show A Boy and His Soul saw him inhabit dozens of characters: a satin-voiced radio
DJ, an uncle’s belly-slapping bonhomie, an exotic dancer doing unspeakable things to a dill
pickle.

But as Domingo got into his 40s, his energy slowed down, smoothed out. And he found his
calling card: a voice that was earthy and rich, the sound of cigars and good whiskey. It’s the
first thing you hear in Lincoln, even before Daniel Day-Lewis, as Domingo’s Union soldier
narrates the Battle of Jenkins’ Ferry. There’s often a comfort to his onscreen presence. In Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, he’s the avuncular trombone player who eases the band into each take:
“A-one, a-two, a-you know what to do.” In If Beale Street Could Talk, he’s the peacemaker, a
man who cuts through ambient anxiety with just a glass of liquor and a glint in his eye. He’s
been making the most of quarantine, setting up a virtual “Bottomless Brunch” series on
YouTube, where the principle pleasure is just relaxing into his company.

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 But there’s a directness to Domingo, too — his is not the voice of a bullshitter. In Euphoria, he
plays Ali, the seen-it-all sponsor to Zendaya’s Rue. The show’s Christmas special was a bottle
episode, the pair facing off in a conversational fencing match, full of feints and parries.
Ultimately, Ali cuts through Rue’s defenses with a flurry of simple declarative statements,
including the question that finally breaks her: “How do you want your mom and sister to
remember you?” Compared to what Zendaya’s giving, Domingo’s part is far less showy, but he
carries it off with quiet certainty. The hammer can’t shape steel without the anvil.

Walton Goggins
First Role: Murder in Mississippi (1990)

You Know Him From: Justified, The Unicorn

Be Sure to Check Out: The Shield, The Righteous

Gemstones

Walton Goggins is not an actor who disappears into a

character. He’s a flexible, thoughtful, meticulous performer,
and his career has demonstrated how fun it is to watch him
embrace characters who can be monstrous (as a bad cop in
The Shield) or hilarious (as characters in Danny McBride
nt Gupta/FX
shows) or sweet (as a single dad in The Unicorn, Goggins’s
first major leading role). But any role Goggins plays carries with it some element of his
distinctive physical presence. He is perpendicular slashes on the screen, a sharp, hips-forward
vertical stride that’s set against his severe horizontal smile.

Goggins has said that his first role was for the 1992 Billy Crystal film Mr. Saturday Night, in
which he played a Confederate soldier who was eventually edited out of the movie. His first
IMDb credit, though, is for a TV movie in 1990 called Murder in Mississippi, in which he
plays a racist mob member who shouts obscenities at civil-rights activists. Goggins’s career has
 been shaped by his performances as baddies and white Southerners, most of whom are
hypocrites, racists, or con men. His role as Shane Vendrell on The Shield made it clear that he
can carry an almost blinding charisma onscreen, but it’s as Boyd Crowder on Justified that
Goggins has been his most indelible — he conveys viciousness and tenderness at once, and his
smile is a scale that tips between messianic self-importance and rueful cynicism.

All Goggins roles are glorious, and Justified’s Boyd Crowder will follow him forever. For a
glimpse of his range, though, and how potent he can be in an ensemble, there is no better
Goggins platform than The Righteous Gemstones, in which he plays Baby Billy Freeman. The
same things that work so well in other roles are at play again there: a character whose public
persona is a shield for lurking subterranean motives, someone who draws in people almost
incidentally, as a mere side effect of being alive. Gemstones adds something else, too. In that
role, Goggins is intense and self-absorbed but also loose-limbed. His grip on the character is
just a smidge lighter, and the result is a scene like “Misbehavin,’” in which all those stark
perpendicular lines come together in a mulleted clogging performance. It’s everything he’s best
at (weird, magnetic, vulpine) in one silly, perfect moment.

Beth Grant
First role: BJ and the Bear (1979)

You Know Her From: Donnie Darko, Speed

Be Sure to Check Out: To Wong Foo, Thanks for

Everything! Julie Newmar

You know exactly who you’re dealing with as soon as a Beth

Grant character walks into frame. The Alabama-born
actress has been playing small-town busybodies,
disapproving religious types, and nervous bystanders with a
near-campy twist since she first broke out, decades ago, in
arket Films
1979’s BJ and the Bear. It’s hard to say whether being as
inextricably linked to a line of movie dialogue as Grant is to Donnie Darko’s “Sometimes I
doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion” is a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, she’s
achieved immortality; on the other, she’s probably accosted with the words of Kitty Farmer
every time she hits the supermarket. Such is the price of being as good as Grant is at making
the smallest roles utterly indelible.
 It’s not exactly heartland decency Grant projects; she tends to embody the fearful, paranoid,
and judgmental corners of our most basic human nature. She’s suspicious of sharp-dressed
Tom Cruise when he shows up on her doorstep with Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, hoping to
commandeer her TV to watch The People’s Court. She’s weak and panicked as Helen in Speed,
stuck on a death-bus and not willing to wait for Keanu Reeves to figure it out — so she tries to
make a break for it and pays the ultimate price.

Her characters aren’t all named “Mother at Farm House,” as was the case in Rain Man, but a
lot of them could be for all the dust on their hems. When To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!
Julie Newmar needed a coterie of small-town women to get made over by drag queens, of
course they called Beth Grant’s number. When the Coen brothers needed a pinched and judgy
face to play Carla Jean’s mother in No Country for Old Men, Grant was the only choice.

She has so effectively carved out her niche in the character-actor universe that she’s achieved a
kind of kitsch appeal. Bryan Fuller kept her as a recurring totem, bringing her Marianne Marie
Beetle character from Wonderfalls to Pushing Daisies to Mockingbird Lane. Perhaps the
perfect encapsulation of Grant’s ability to communicate a character instantaneously was in a
2004 episode of Six Feet Under, where she played a religious woman mistaking escaped blow-
up sex dolls floating into the sky for the Rapture. Everything we know about a Beth Grant
character made it perfectly logical for her to chase those blow-up angels into the path of
oncoming traffic (Dorothy Sheedy, 1954–2003), a tragic yet perfect end for a woman played by
the patron saint of Middle American hysteria.

Judy Greer
First role: Early Edition (1997)

You Know Her From: 13 Going on 30, Arrested

Development, Ant-Man

Be Sure to Check Out: Married, Halloween, Adaptation

In the Funny or Die sketch “Judy Greer Is the Best Friend,”

the actress sits at a diner with her lovestruck bestie. Greer
encourages her to go to the airport and catch the love of her
life before he’s gone. The friend runs out of the door and the
music swells, but once she’s gone, Greer sits awkwardly in
bia Tri Star/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
silence. What is left for her to do if not coach her friends on
their love lives? The bit is funny, though also painfully real as a reflection of a career full of
thinly written roles that exist only to support the protagonist. It’s a fact that Greer knows all
too well, having titled her 2014 memoir I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of
a Co-Star.

What makes Greer one of our great character actors is that she’s taken this unfortunate reality
in stride by consistently and exceptionally making the most of what she has. She’s staggeringly
prolific, amassing close to 150 credits, and these countless opportunities have given her the
chance to highlight real nuances and depth in stock characters. Films like The Wedding
Planner and 13 Going on 30 solidified her as the early-aughts go-to, must-book bubbly
sidekick. But she also possesses a once-in-a-lifetime comedic timing that is singularly and
innately unhinged. (See every time she stole a scene in Arrested Development as a boob-
flashing personal assistant.)

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More recently, she has been repeatedly cast as a housewife, or a grumpy ex-wife, or a mother
who doubles as an exposition dump. And yet for all the typecasting, these are not just a
homogeneous string of roles but distinctive characters that are a testament to her versatility.
2018’s Halloween in particular brilliantly played with familiar archetypes by having her play an
uptight mother, only to upend those expectations with a bombastic finale that gave Greer her
own triumphant Laurie Strode moment. Greer’s omnipresence in pop culture gifts us the
 comfort of a familiar face, and even the most thankless roles are all the more vibrant in her
hands.

Luis Guzmán
First role: Short Eyes (1977)

You Know Him From: Carlito’s Way, Traffic, Code Black

Be Sure to Check Out: The Count of Monte Cristo, Anger

Management, Ana Maria In Novela Land

Luis Guzmán is an Everyman with the charisma of a leading

man, and he has used it to play literally every man. For
Steven Soderberg, he’s played a criminal on the run (Out of
Sight), a working-class ex-con (The Limey), and a DEA
agent (Traffic). For Paul Thomas Anderson, he’s been a
sal Pictures
nightclub owner (Boogie Nights), a game-show contestant
(Magnolia), and a random factory worker (Punch-Drunk Love). He’s played a smuggler (The
Adventures of Pluto Nash), a bodyguard (Carlito’s Way), and another smuggler, in 19th-
century France, who becomes a bodyguard (The Count of Monte Cristo). No matter his
character’s profession or when a film is set, Guzmán not only makes each feel like a real person
but makes you wish you knew him.

He has a precise comic timing and a unique intensity that he can amplify or attenuate given
the needs of a scene. This makes him a perfect screen partner — he knows when to let stars
shine and when to steal a scene out from under them, even if they’re megawatt personalities
like Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight), Jack Nicholson (Anger Management), and Denzel
Washington (The Bone Collector). He’s a perfect partner for writers, too: his chameleonic skill
for making written dialogue feel unscripted enables him to seem like someone you’d meet out
in the real world. (With 150 film and TV credits under his belt, he’s probably played someone
you actually have.)

Stephen McKinley Henderson

First Role: A Pleasure Doing Business (1979)
 You Know Him From: Fences, Lincoln, Lady Bird

Be Sure to Check Out: Devs

Those who watch August Wilson plays have grown first

accustomed to, then dependent on, Stephen McKinley
Henderson. In his dramas, Wilson often wrote Virgil-in-
Inferno figures, men who serve as quasi-mystical guides and
foils for his troubled main characters, wise and clear-eyed,
but not necessarily fated for grace themselves. Henderson’s
ount Pictures
unadorned style and dry gravitas make him perfect for these
roles — onstage, he plants himself like the stationary leg on a compass — so it’s no shock how
he became part of the unofficial Wilson company. He’s a big man, but he doesn’t take up space;
he radiates calm and the kind of Zen amusement that laughs at whatever’s most serious. Over
the decades, he has played in the marquee Wilson productions, almost always as the one still
point in the protagonist’s chaotic universe. In Fences with Denzel Washington, he played the
unflappable Jim Bono, first in 2010 on Broadway and then on film. It may have been there
that national audiences first realized that they wanted him as their companion-in-trouble too.

McKinley Henderson is a presence deserving of center stage. He is Tony nominated for Fences,
and Stephen Adly Guirgis wrote him the complex role of a lifetime in Between Riverside and
Crazy, in which his retired-cop character loses his claim to moral certainty. But in film, he’s
largely been used at the edges, twinkling. One of his first film credits is as Bobo in an American
Playhouse production of A Raisin in the Sun, a sly little performance, one of his rare chances
to be wicked. Usually television has taken his weightiness and turned it into authority, casting
him as a judge or a psychiatrist. (He’s been two different recurring judges on two different Law
& Order franchises.) You can sense all those guardian roles in his stature and cloud of now-
white hair: We’ve been trained to find something rather paternal in the way he’s peripheral. In
Lady Bird, he’s the patient but exasperated Father Leviatch, and you often find him playing
roles called “Pops” or “Dad.”

Finally, film has started to capitalize on his other abilities, like the way his eyes can shift,
suddenly, from kindness into untrustworthiness. Alex Garland knew just how to deploy him in
the sci-fi TV show Devs, for instance, where he’s a quiet-voiced scientist. Garland uses
Henderson’s steadiness as if he’s a grenade — for the whole season, he just rolls quietly across
the floor, never hinting that he might be capable of blowing up the plot. That “Who me? A
grenade?” quality will serve him well as Thufir Hawat in the upcoming Dune. You’ll have to
look at him twice to really see him. The first time you’ll see the saint; the second time, you’ll
see the bomb.
 Brian Tyree Henry
First role: Law & Order (2009)

You Know Him From: Atlanta, If Beale Street Could Talk,

Widows

Be Sure to Check Out: Crown Heights, Family, Joker

When we talk about range, we’re talking about Brian Tyree

Henry. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, in the last
five years he’s become a comedic, romantic, and dramatic
force by way of his beguiling laugh and his immense
physical control. As the emerging rapper Paper Boi in
urna Pictures
Donald Glover’s surreal Atlanta, Henry conjures a big heart
for an initially intimidating character by undermining his imposing (and depressed) presence
with twisted, aggravated facial expressions that serve as unguarded sight gags. As Jamal
Manning — a menacing former drug dealer running for Chicago alderman in Steve McQueen’s
Widows, Henry leans into Jamal’s brooding frame: When Jamal strides into the luxe condo of
Veronica Rawlings (Viola Davis), he picks up her adorable white terrier and threatens the tiny
animal with violence if his demands aren’t met. The moment brims with a frightening tension.

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But his signature role might be a single, breathless scene in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street
Could Talk. During a carefree conversation between his character Daniel, recently released
from prison, and Daniel’s best friend Fonny (Stephan James), Henry dissolves a loud and jolly
exterior into a quiet impenetrability when the pair discuss the horrors of jail. It’s the way
Henry leverages his physique and cheerful disposition, which goes from loose to scared stiff,
that asks: What does incarceration do that would render a colossal, big-hearted Black man like
Daniel so small? And in so doing, it gives Beale Street its most haunting scene.

Greta Lee
First role: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2006)

You Know Her From: Russian Doll, High Maintenance,

Girls

Be Sure to Check Out: Inside Amy Schumer, What We Do

in the Shadows

Since her start with an appearance on Law & Order: SVU,

Greta Lee has moved up to become a quintessential
character actor in the New York City scene. Building on
appearances on critically acclaimed comedies like Inside
Amy Schumer, Broad City, Girls, and High Maintenance,
Lee scored an unforgettable part opposite Natasha Lyonne in Netflix’s Russian Doll in 2019.
She plays Maxine, the chipper good friend throwing a big birthday party for Lyonne’s
character, Nadia. Unfortunately, the party leads Nadia into a strange time loop, so while
Maxine begins her introduction the same way almost every time, she must then change to
react to Nadia’s increasingly paranoid and frustrated behavior.

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 In between numerous TV-show appearances, Lee has been in a handful of movies like Sisters,
Gemini, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Post–Russian Doll’s splashy first season, Lee
has kept busy with a variety of guest appearances on shows like The Twilight Zone, What We
Do in the Shadows, and The Morning Show. That these series are so wildly different in tone
and scope underscores how Lee can thrive in just about any environment, from horror to
comedy to drama, immersing herself into whatever the role calls for her to do. She can do what
feels like dozens of takes on her famous Russian Doll line “Sweet birthday baby” and never run
out of energy. Her charisma steals scenes both small and large, which is saying something
when paired with an actor as captivating as Lyonne. But it’s a talent that comes from the
rapport she creates with her partners in any given scene — building on each other’s presences
to make every moment count.

John Carroll Lynch

First role: Grumpy Old Men (1993)

You know him from: Fargo (the movie), The Americans,

American Horror Story

Be sure to check out: Zodiac, The Founder, The Trial of the

Chicago 7

The binary that distinguishes John Carroll Lynch is

probably best expressed in two of his greatest performances.

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In Fargo, he plays Norm Gunderson, the supportive and genial husband of Marge Gunderson
(Frances McDormand), chief of police. He’s set up as a foil to the film’s more sordid men, a
model of the very opposite of toxic masculinity, and Lynch embodies that ethos with aplomb.
He wraps his arm lovingly around Marge as she takes dead-of-night calls, smiles with a
pleasure in life that recalls a benevolent moon, and moves with the steady purpose of a man
who is simply where he knows he ought to be.

But that same visage and pace, with a few small tweaks, becomes one of film’s most nightmare-
haunting villains in Zodiac. Lynch plays Arthur Leigh Allen, a prime Zodiac Killer suspect.
Lynch’s version of Allen appears both totally innocent, a man with explanations for everything,
and intensely menacing. You get the sense that there’s something twitching under his skin,
which is pulled tight to contain him. It’s unnerving for those who suspect him, but it’s equally
unnerving for the audience, whose perception of Allen’s guilt or innocence changes by the
millisecond. Lynch has said that Fincher asked him to play the character as if he were
innocent, but it’s no wonder that he’d later play a bevy of killers and creeps on American
Horror Story, including Twisty the Clown and serial murderer John Wayne Gacy.

That Lynch can morph from comforting to nerve-wracking by tweaking the energy emanating
from his limbs proves how talented of an actor he is, and it’s why we love him: When he shows
up onscreen, it’s never quite clear what we’ll get or what’s boiling beneath the surface. Lynch
looks, at the end of the day, like any guy you might pass on the street, a big but ordinary fellow
who perches on a barstool or is a partner at a law firm. But his long career in film, TV, and the
theater is a testament to his ability to harness an ordinary physicality into something
extraordinary, pulling together these poles — the menacing and the comforting, the goofy and
the deadly serious. That’s why his appearance sparks a frisson of excitement. Something very
interesting is about to happen when Lynch enters.

Jason Mantzoukas
First Screen Role: Upright Citizens Brigade (2000)

You Know Him From: The League, Parks and Recreation,

How Did This Get Made? (podcast)

Be Sure to Check Out: Transparent, The Long, Dumb

Road
 Jason Mantzoukas cannot be escaped. Turn on an episode
of The Good Place, and there he is as Derek, the robot
boyfriend who does not understand how martini glasses
works/Everett Collections
work. Settle in to watch John Wick 3: Parabellum, and there
he is again in the unsettling role of Tick Tock Man.

He does voices in the stuff your kids like to watch, like DuckTales and Doolittle. He does voices
in the stuff you like to watch after your kids have gone to bed, like Big Mouth. He’s a blob of
mucus in a Mucinex commercial, an extremely stressed detective on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a
slightly skeezy weed doctor on Transparent, and a goddamned bumblebee in Dickinson.

Mantzoukas is that guy that you’re always delighted to see when he pops up somewhere, which
works out well since he is always popping up somewhere. This is ironic considering that he
first registered on many TV viewers’ radars as Rafi, the psychopathic inappropriate-comment
generator on The League, who, in the real world, you would prefer never to see anywhere. Rafi
established what has become the Mantzoukas Wheelhouse: portraying weirdos of security-
alarm-tripping proportions, a propensity that suits his large wild eyes and that raspy voice,
which can sound broish, stonerish, or genuinely philosophical depending on how it’s
calibrated. But Mantzoukas has dramatic range, too. Watch him in The Long, Dumb Road, a
2018 indie movie in which he gets the rare chance to play a lead in the form of Richard, a
strange, funny, possibly disturbed dude who hitches a ride out West with an art-school student
(Tony Revolori). You’ll laugh, you’ll feel pity, you’ll feel uncomfortable, and you’ll realize that
Jason Mantzoukas isn’t just everywhere — he’s also capable of anything.

Tzi Ma
First role: Cocaine Cowboys (1979)

You Know Him From: Rush Hour, The Farewell, Mulan

Be Sure to Check Out: Tigertail, Dante’s Peak, Rapid Fire

In the last few years, Tzi Ma has started popping up in some

of Hollywood’s most high-profile films: playing Awkwafina’s
father in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Mulan’s father in Niki
Caro’s live-action take on the beloved Disney film, and the
older Pin-Jui in Alan Yang’s semi-autobiographical film
Tigertail. But the ubiquitous actor has, as his fans know,
ne Cinema
delivered striking and indelible work for decades. Born in
Hong Kong and raised on Staten Island, Ma is a quintessential New York actor with roots on
the stage that inform his work in film and television. Ma signed up for drama in high school
and, having been inspired by seeing Mako’s towering lead performance in Pacific Overtures,
pursued the profession full time. Like Mako, Ma’s career would not be defined by one kind of
role or one medium.

Through his early work in experimental theater coupled with his study of martial arts, Ma
honed his physical abilities. His command over his body is always apparent, changing his gait
and posture for each performance, whether he’s playing a diplomat (Rush Hour), a
volcanologist (Dante’s Peak), a general (Arrival), or a fire chief (Skyscraper). This physicality,
coupled with the sheer variety of roles he’s played, brings a Shakespearean quality to his screen
presence. Ma understands that, as in Shakespeare, each role in a story is important and, no
matter the size, deserves care and attention in creating an interior world for the character to
inhabit. A master of dialects and languages, Ma has played ethnicities including Chinese,
Filipino, Vietnamese, Laotian, Taiwanese, and Japanese. Even after racking up more than 100
credits — including appearances in more than 75 different television shows — it’s as if you’re
seeing him for the first time every time he’s onscreen. As if he is that person in real life, caught
by a camera vérité, grounding and sharpening every project graced by his presence.

Elizabeth Marvel
First role: Homicide: Life on the Street (1998)

You know her from: House of Cards, Homeland, Law &

Order: SVU

Be sure to check out: News of the World, True Grit,

American Masters: Louisa May Alcott

Elizabeth Marvel projects the kind of competence and

authority that makes audiences feel like no matter how bad
things have gotten, at least someone is in charge. The
appearance that she’s got everything under control is all the
more remarkable given that the characters she’s played who
are closest to power — like presidential candidate Heather Dunbar on House of Cards and
President Elizabeth Keane on Homeland — often find themselves foiled in the end. Still, you
wouldn’t want to get in her way.
Watch

No doubt some of that command comes from her extensive background on the stage, where
she worked for years before picking up her first TV role and to which she occasionally still
returns. (She played Goneril in the gender-bent King Lear starring Glenda Jackson in 2019.)
The way she takes over a room can be intimidating, but she’s not coldly present; she’s a ball of
flames and a little unpredictable. The set of her jaw is as expressive as her eyes, which can slice
right through an errant interlocutor.

Those qualities aren’t lessened when her character isn’t in a power suit or holding a detective’s
notepad. She’s played everything from the grown-up version of Mattie in the Coens’ True Grit
to Louisa May Alcott in an American Masters documentary about the Little Women author’s
life. In period performances, she always gives off the feeling of a woman who knows her worth,
against whatever the world around her says a woman should be. And a recent performance ties
together her strengths: In the Western News of the World, Marvel plays Ella Gannett, an
innkeeper in Dallas who has a casual but long-standing relationship and genuine friendship
with Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks). She also speaks some Kiowa, the native language spoken by
the child that Kidd is protecting, and her tenderness with the child matches her affectionate
but stern admonitions to Kidd, who is running away from his past. It’s a quintessential Marvel
performance, memorable as a linchpin for the story, and embodying what makes her so
immensely watchable.
 Aparna Nancherla
First role: Chloe + Zoë (2012)

You Know Her From: BoJack Horseman, Crashing, Mythic

Quest: Raven’s Banquet

Be Sure to Check Out: A Simple Favor, Ginger Snaps

As she ascended from comedy-circle staple to rising screen

star, comedian Aparna Nancherla pulled off the remarkable
feat of jumping to movies and TV shows without losing her
voice, wry wit, and deadpan delivery. While cutting her
teeth as a writer for shows like Totally Biased With W.
hutterstock
Kamau Bell and Late Night With Seth Meyers in early to
mid-2010s, Nancherla’s profile grew as she landed front-of-camera appearances on Inside
Amy Schumer, The Jim Gaffigan Show, and a few years later, Master of None. In her stand-up,
she’s often vulnerable and confessional, taking on personal topics like mental health, and
many of her best acting performances have built on those introspective stand-up sensibilities.

She’s branched out into voice acting: leading a show like Ginger Snaps, where she played a
character desperate for a mean girl’s approval, and making guest appearances on Steven
Universe, Mira, Royal Detective, and adult animation like Bob’s Burgers and You’re Not a
Monster. Her most famous animated role has been on BoJack Horseman, where she voiced the
character of Hollyhock, BoJack’s presumed daughter who turned out to be his half-sister.
Nancherla’s performance on the show balances Hollyhock’s insecurities with her clear-eyed
view of BoJack, and she’s able to convey vulnerability and condemnation in the same breath.

But it’s in the live action realm where her gifts are most resonant. Nancherla skewered soulless
company culture in Comedy Central’s Corporate and joined Netflix’s comedy Space Force to
dunk on, well, the United States Space Force. In Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, Nancherla
plays a dissatisfied worker at a chaotic video game studio, making her hatred of her bosses a
running punchline. She delivers cutting remarks with a no-nonsense weariness. Her
characters in these shows are simply over it, and her disdain for her enemies or roadblocks is a
way to laugh through circumstances beyond one’s control. Nancherla’s brand of humor is a
type of millennial malaise that is often felt but rarely communicated, which makes her a
perfect stand-in to dismiss the authority figures who have dismissed us.
 Fred Melamed
First role: One Life to Live (1981)

You know him from: A Serious Man, WandaVision

Be sure to check out: In a World, Lady Dynamite

The quintessential Fred Melamed role comes in A Serious

Man. Melamed plays Sy Ableman, the smarmy nemesis to
Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik. Sy is not exactly
everything Larry wants to be, but he has everything Larry
wants, most importantly the love of Larry’s wife. “I am a
serious man,” Sy tells Larry; later, he is eulogized with those
Features
same words. But he’s not a serious man; he’s a joke, at least
to us, the kind of character who very seriously pontificates to his rival about letting his wine
breathe. That doesn’t make him any less a villain, but there’s a whiff of buffoonery around him
that Melamed nails with unctuous, hammy assurance.

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Melamed has had a sprawling career, working extensively with directors like Woody Allen and
the Coen brothers while popping up everywhere else, from TV soaps and procedurals to indie
flicks, often playing Jewish characters. He has one of those faces you just remember, if not
quite from where: bald and full-lipped, with eyes that always look just a little amused and a
beard that’s gone handsomely gray over the years. He is your high-school science teacher, your
father’s best friend, the owner of the bookstore downtown who always knows what you’re
looking for. That makes it even funnier when he’s playing a hapless or pompous character; we
all know it’s a little bit of a clown act, and the juxtaposition is what makes it work.

And he has that voice. You might know Melamed’s baritone better than his face; he’s worked as
an announcer on shows like NFL Today and voiced characters in animated shows, like Wonder
Pets! and Adventure Time, and video games, including several Grand Theft Auto installments
and Fallout 76. He’s so identified with voice-overs that in Lake Bell’s brilliant comedy In a
World he plays reigning Hollywood voice-over king Sam Soto, father to another (female)
aspiring voice-over artist. In several episodes of the short-lived sitcom The Crazy Ones, he
played a version of himself as a voice-over artist conflicted about his career.

But what might be best about Melamed is the sense that he’s always up for an adventure. In
the past decade, he’s played everything from Uncle Vanya onstage — a challenge for any actor
— to luckless but well-meaning talent manager Bruce Ben-Bacharach in Maria Bamford’s
offbeat comedy Lady Dynamite. He’s never a caricature, but he’s one of those actors who
brings the other roles you’ve seen him in to every fresh character; there’s decades of slightly
smirking, good-natured amusement in every performance.

Rob Morgan
First Role: Yes, Madame (2004)

You Know Him From: Stranger Things, This Is Us,

Daredevil

Be Sure to Check Out: The Last Black Man in San

Francisco, Bull, Just Mercy

Rob Morgan holds the distinction of being the only actor to

appear in all six of Netflix’s Marvel TV shows, and in true
character-actor fashion, Morgan’s Turk Barrett is not a
superhero. Rather, he’s a small-time crook who makes
 scattered appearances — as comic relief.

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Morgan is great in the part, though comedy is hardly his calling card. Before he entered the
Marvel Universe, Morgan acted in short films and had bit parts in shows like 30 Rock, Blue
Bloods, and everyone’s favorite New York actor incubator, Law & Order: SVU, though in the
past decade he’s also taken on film roles in vital tales centering Black stories, among them Dee
Rees’s Pariah, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Monsters and Men, and Daniel Destin Cretton’s Just
Mercy. In the last, surrounded by heavyweights including Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx,
Morgan left an impression by navigating the psychologically complex role of a real-life
Vietnam veteran who received a death sentence for committing a heinous crime. That same
year, he played the father of the protagonist in Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San
Francisco and brought memorable gravitas and lived-in wisdom to the role.

Such serious roles give an actor a lot to chew on, but Morgan never veers into cliché. The New
York Times critic A.O. Scott included Morgan on a recent list of the greatest actors of the 21st
century, praising his distinct ability to “give eloquent expression to experiences that lie outside
the main story even as they ground it in a larger history.” Indeed, Morgan has consistently
been a source of quiet intelligence on the sidelines, and as his roles get bigger — such as in
Annie Silverstein’s Bull, an intimate drama centered on his poignant starring turn as a
tortured former rodeo bull rider — that quality will serve him — and viewers — well.
 Denis O’Hare
First role: The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1993)

You Know Him From: True Blood, The Good Wife

Be Sure to Check Out: Swallow, Michael Clayton

A character actor would kill to sink their teeth into the kind
of role that Denis O’Hare got on the HBO vampire
bacchanal True Blood, and few deserved the opportunity
more. By the time O’Hare had begun to appear regularly on
film and in TV, he’d already made a name for himself on
Broadway, winning a Tony Award in 2003 for Take Me Out.
But by the late aughts, O’Hare started to get noticed on
screen, primarily for playing either venal influence-pushers or doctors delivering unwelcome
news. He played a cheerfully amoral political consultant on Brothers & Sisters and had a small
but crucial role in the excellent Michael Clayton as a man whose crimes George Clooney’s title
character needs to fix. Both roles showcased O’Hare’s ability to evince villainy, cut with
something more disarmingly human.

True Blood, though: It was as Russell Edgington on Alan Ball’s show that O’Hare was able to
take that particular quality to its gaudiest ends. A vampire king of refined tastes and lusty
queer appetites, Russell could have easily fallen into the cliche of the effete villain were it not
for O’Hare digging his heels into Russell’s passion, simmering rage, and biting humor. True
Blood helped springboard O’Hare into recurring roles on American Horror Story, where he
played an assortment of sad ghouls and misfits. Even in a more horror-adjacent role in the
2020 film Swallow, O’Hare nails a single-scene turn as a figure from Haley Bennett’s past who
looms terrifyingly yet mundanely in her present.

When he’s not doing backstrokes in the horror pool, O’Hare is playing functionaries with a
spark. He’s a doctor in 21 Grams, Baby Mama, Dallas Buyers Club, Changeling, The Judge,
and Private Life. He’s a CIA station chief in Charlie Wilson’s War, a Wall Street Journal editor
in A Mighty Heart, and an archbishop in Novitiate. Most memorably, he’s a judge on The Good
Wife and Fight, preoccupied with his own liberal politics, in the way that all the judges on The
Good Wife were preoccupied with their own little quirks.
 O’Hare is also the rare character actor whose personal queerness is never far from the surface,
manifesting most significantly in roles like Liz Taylor in American Horror Story: Hotel or in his
Emmy-nominated performance as a returned ex-lover on This Is Us. It’s these roles that tend
to allow O’Hare to step out of the villain realm or the doctor’s coat and play layers of sadness
and regret in incredibly touching ways. He’s still managing to surprise us with a theater-
trained emotional agility in even the smallest roles.

John Ortiz
First role: Carlito’s Way (1993)

You Know Him From: Fast and Furious, Silver Linings

Playbook, Kong: Skull Island

Be Sure to Check Out: Miami Vice, Jack Goes Boating,

Luck

A major figure in American theater, Ortiz co-founded the

LAByrinth Theater Company with his good friend, the late
Philip Seymour Hoffman, in 1992, and currently serves as
its artistic director. Over the years, he has portrayed onstage
sal/Courtesy Everett Collection
such parts as Othello (Hoffman was his Iago) and Jesus
Christ (Sam Rockwell was his Jesus). It’s nothing new for leading theater performers to wind
up with character parts in film and TV, of course. What’s notable is that for an actor with such
theatrical pedigree, there’s something uniquely cinematic about the roles Ortiz has done on
film: He can do so much with just a stare or a whisper. Those curious eyes of his can exude
warmth and stability one minute (think of him as one of the few sailors who don’t completely
break down emotionally in the ocean rescue thriller Finest Hours), unspeakable menace the
next (watch him maintain his soft-spoken, sinister tranquillity as Arturo Braga, the chief
villain in Fast & Furious).

To a certain segment of film buffs, he will always be known for his electrifying turn as Jose
Yero, the calculating, simultaneously psychotic and pathetic drug lord in Michael Mann’s film
version of Miami Vice, a part to which he brought unspoken layers of jealousy, suspicion, and
thwarted ambition. (Ortiz works with Mann often, most recently as an FBI honcho in
Blackhat.) But just a couple of years later, Ortiz was one of the four leads of Philip Seymour
Hoffman’s sole directorial effort, Jack Goes Boating, as the blundering, gabby, long-suffering
limo driver Clyde, reprising a role he had originated (and mastered) onstage. It was a striking
demonstration of his range – not to mention what he’s capable of doing when Hollywood can
come up with better parts for him.

Gayle Rankin
First Role: Law & Order SVU (2012)

You Know Her From: GLOW, Perry Mason

Be Sure to Check Out: Her Smell, Blow the Man Down

The role Gayle Rankin is most known for, the one that made
her an actor to pay attention to, is Sheila the She Wolf on
Netflix’s GLOW. It’s a strange role for a breakout
performance — while most characters on GLOW play their
wrestling personas for comedy in order to work out
fantasies or traumas, Sheila’s wolf persona and her real life
are inextricable. It’s a comfort blanket she cannot bring
herself to put down, ever. Rankin plays a character hiding inside another character, and it’s so
easy to imagine that performance getting lost, either by disappearing altogether inside the wolf
outfit or by pumping it up to cartoonish proportions. But Rankin holds everything in balance,
preserving Sheila’s humanity and her vulnerability while fully committing to … well, look, she’s
a woman who insists she’s actually a wolf.

Rankin is a Julliard-trained actor with a gift for adding subtle shades to starkly or simply
drawn characters, as the drummer in Her Smell or as a nurse in Meyerowitz Stories. It helps
that Rankin has a memorable face; her deep-set eyes and prominent chin present fascinating
angles on-camera, but they’re not one-note assets. As Sheila, her eyes do the work, shining out
from behind dark wolf makeup, but as Queen Victoria in The Greatest Showman, the severity
of her jawline catches the eye the most. As a grieving mother in HBO’s Perry Mason, Rankin
animates both sides of that equation. She is soft and fragile; she is steely and resilient.

There are two lesser-known Rankin performances that warrant mention. One, in the 2019
movie Blow the Man Down, has Rankin filling the role of Alexis, who could so easily be
portrayed as a depressing small-town prostitute, with rage, humanity, and self-righteousness.
The other was as Ophelia in the Public Theater’s 2017 Hamlet. In an otherwise stripped-down
production, Ophelia was given the biggest, most eye-catching set design in a drowning
sequence where she buried herself in dirt, then flooded the stage with a hose. In a production
 full of other big performances (Oscar Isaac was Hamlet), it would have been easy to lose
Ophelia. But even when she eventually lay still, on a floor covered with mud and flowers,
Rankin was still the biggest presence in that room.

Lance Reddick
First Role: New York Undercover (1996)

You Know Him From: The Wire, Fringe, John Wick

Be Sure to Check Out: American Horror Story, Sylvie’s

Love, Corporate

For a long stretch of his acting career, Lance Reddick got

stuck playing a particular kind of character. They’re the
roles he’s still best known for: figures of authority, mid-to-
upper-level guys with a badge. His highest-profile role is
Cedric Daniels on The Wire, a Baltimore cop who wants to
ate
get promoted and knows he has to work inside the system
to make that happen, but who also knows the system is irrevocably broken. He plays similar
roles as Phillip Broyles on Fringe and Irvin Irving on Bosch. He is the Black boss of irascible
white lone wolves. He’s not the rogue crime fighter breaking things apart in order to find
justice. He’s that guy’s supervisor.

Once Reddick got pegged as a big guy with a badge, though, it was hard to shake that image.
He has played detectives, medical examiners, FBI agents, and lieutenants in almost every
genre of TV — on Fringe he’s an agent in a science-fiction world, on Oz he’s a prestige-drama
police officer, on Paradise PD he’s an FBI agent in an animated sitcom. Even as a voice actor
on the revival of DuckTales Reddick plays a general. His physical presence is instantly striking,
a combination of his stark, bald head, his piercing eyes, and the shoulders-back, chest-forward
way he tends to move in a room. For many of his characters, it’s the voice that really resonates:
Reddick’s typical speaking voice is beautiful, and he’s able to shade in an almost gravelly
roughness when he wants to really emphasize his power.

In the past several years, though, it’s been wonderful to watch Reddick have the opportunity to
play other kinds of characters. He’s memorable as the hotel concierge Charon in the John Wick
movies and as a father on Sylvie’s Love. On American Horror Story, he attacks the role of the
Haitian spirit of the underworld character Papa Legba with relish. But to really get a sense of
 Reddick’s range, you must watch his work on the Comedy Central show Corporate, in which he
plays a deranged, egomaniacal CEO who terrifies his underlings. Reddick may be best known
for learning that you cannot lose if you do not play, but if you don’t know him as the guy
begging for the global streaming rights to Gilmore Girls, you’re missing out.

Stephen Root
First role: Crocodile Dundee II (1989)

You Know Him From: Office Space, Dodgeball: A True

Underdog Story, Barry

Be Sure to Check Out: NewsRadio, King of the Hill,

Justified

Stephen Root became a ’90s meme, or a mascot of sorts, in

Mike Judge’s Office Space. As the Swingline stapler-obsessed
and perpetually pilloried underdog Milton Waddams, Root
was almost unrecognizable, not necessarily because of the
entury Fox
coke-bottle glasses, mustache, and frazzled hair, but thanks
to his high-pitched mumbling.

Root is a vocal chameleon, and it’s a key component to his memorable everyman roles. The
transformation is so complete that one might find themselves repeating, Wait, is that Stephen
Root? while watching almost any of his performances. Yes, that is the same actor playing the
self-effacing Milton who was also the blowhard billionaire station owner Jimmy James in
NewsRadio, and the Deep South country-radio host who sounds like he’s straight out of the
bayou in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?

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With a background on Broadway, and an extensive TV and film career including stints on The
West Wing, and a longtime run as one of the Coen brothers’ favorite character actors, his 256
IMDb credits are filled with lots of these fully committed high-concept character
performances. So it was a breath of fresh air to see Root in a more grounded performance in
Bill Hader’s HBO hitman dramedy Barry. His portrayal of Barry’s estranged handler Fuches is
some of his finest work to date, and his performance garnered him his first major awards
nomination at the 2019 Emmys. Barry is as much a show about the hard work of being an
actor trying to get a foothold in an impossible industry as it is about a hitman, and the creators
clearly have a reverence for those excellent character actors who consistently steal the
spotlight, no matter the size of the part. So of course they cast Root.

Lois Smith
First role: Love of Life (1951)

You know her from: Lady Bird, Minority Report, True

Blood

Be sure to check out: Marjorie Prime, Five Easy Pieces,

Foxes

There are few more iconic ways to begin a career than with
a performance opposite James Dean. Following a string of
TV roles in the early ʻ50s, Lois Smith made her film debut
as a barmaid in East of Eden and has been acting
consistently ever since. Throughout her seven (!) decades as
an actress, she’s starred in plays, showed up in a range of TV shows, and made supporting
appearances in pretty much every genre of film you can imagine, from acclaimed dramas to
science fiction to erotic thrillers to coming-of-age stories and beyond. Her résumé is filled with
 performances alongside decade-defining stars: In 1970, she played none other than Jack
Nicholson’s sister in the New Hollywood classic Five Easy Pieces. In more recent decades, she’s
provided counsel to Tom Cruise in Minority Report (as a scientific innovator) and Saoirse
Ronan in Lady Bird (as a Catholic-school nun).

In a rare starring role in indie director Michael Almereyda’s low-key futuristic drama Marjorie
Prime, Smith acted alongside Jon Hamm, portraying the pain of Alzheimer’s disease with
poignant subtlety rather than the tear-jerking drama that might be expected from such a role.
Considering the ageism so often faced by actors, particularly women, Smith’s consistent career
is all the more impressive — she’s continued working with a steadiness that would make most
younger actresses jealous. She embodies aging gracefully not just physically, but also in terms
of talent, and her presence is always a balm: She carries herself with the innate wisdom that
only decades of hard work mixed with natural charisma can provide, bringing a touch of
classic Hollywood charm wherever she shows up.

Michael Stuhlbarg
First role: A Price Above Rubies (1998)

You Know Him From: A Serious Man, The Shape of Water,

Call Me by Your Name

Be Sure to Check Out: Boardwalk Empire, Hugo, Shirley

From the moment Michael Stuhlbarg takes the screen as the

embattled Larry Gopnik in the Coen brothers’ A Serious
Man (opposite Fred Melamed, discussed earlier), the actor
shows off his impressive range, capable of playing both a
simp and an agitator, easily flustered yet endearingly
ctures Classic/Shutterstock
earnest. It’s part of a career streak that has only become
richer with time, as he’s played everything from a conflicted scientist in Guillermo del Toro’s
The Shape of Water to an empathetic professor dad who delivered that unforgettable show-
stopping speech at the end of Call Me by Your Name.

Like his The Shape of Water co-star Michael Shannon, Stuhlbarg has mastered both leading
and supporting roles. He has a habit of showing up in movies and TV shows already rich with
other strong character actors, but always brings his own brand of stand-out intensity, whether
that’s a reserved intensity like the mob boss he portrayed in Boardwalk Empire or the
 competitive newspaper editor in The Post. A theater veteran, Stuhlbarg knows how to tune
into subtleties — how to pose his body when delivering that quietly moving speech in Call Me
by Your Name or begging for an appointment with a rabbi in A Serious Man. Playing the
Richard Burton to Elisabeth Moss’s Elizabeth Taylor in Shirley, Stuhlberg darkens his
deceptively promising professor’s intentions and leans into his character’s hostility. It’s one of
his best talents: repressing emotions until an inevitable outburst sets his character loose, and
truly frightens you.

Stephen Tobolowsky
First role: Keep My Grave Open (1977)

You Know Him From: Groundhog Day, Memento, The

Goldbergs

Be Sure to Check Out: Thelma & Louise, Deadwood,

Silicon Valley

Stephen Tobolowsky is easy to recognize but hard to pin

down. There’s no mistaking the pleasant, usually
bespectacled face beneath a hairline that had already begun
receding when Tobolowsky first started showing up in
bia Pictures
Hollywood movies like Swing Shift and Spaceballs in the
1980s. And no actor has quite the same lilting voice, a product of his Dallas upbringing. He’s
probably most famous as Bill Murray’s daily tormenter Ned Ryerson (“Needle-Nose Ned! Ned
the Head!”) in Groundhog Day, but even those who’ve somehow missed that film have
doubtlessly seen him somewhere. Tobolowsky played the unfortunate Sammy Jankis in
Memento, Commissioner Jarry on Deadwood, and Dr. Berkowitz on One Day at a Time — but
he also played Norbert Barrington in The Country Bears and B.J. McQueen in Alien Fury:
Countdown to Invasion and “Plumber” in You May Not Kiss the Bride.

Watch
He’s ready to work, in other words, in projects big and small, long remembered or quickly
forgotten, as evidenced by a filmography currently approaching 300 entries with no evidence
of lost momentum. If that weren’t enough, Tobolowsky also has a sideline as an essayist — he’s
written several books — and podcaster via The Tobolowsky Files. Appropriately, each episode
opens with co-host David Chen plumbing Tobolowsky’s memory for details about one of his
hundreds of roles, occasionally stumping him in the process.

Yet as easy as it is to slot Tobolowsky into films requiring a scene or two with a district
attorney, doctor, or professor, he doesn’t really have a type. There’s always an X-factor to a
Tobolowsky performance, a sense that his characters have unseen depths. Sometimes those
depths appear quite dark. In a film filled with abusive brutes, Tobolowsky gets Thelma &
Louise’s most chilling moment as Max, a lawman who advises Thelma’s husband that, if she
calls, to be gentle, because “women love that shit.” It might have been a laugh line for another
actor. For Tobolowsky, it allows for a concise expression of misogyny’s ubiquity, an awful
sentiment said not by a leering trucker or one of the other nasty men the heroines meet on
their journey but by a mild-mannered guy in a suit. More often, Tobolowsky supplies an
intriguing spark that suggests his characters have rich lives beyond their sometimes fleeting
moments on the screen. It’s fitting that he’s found an audience as a storyteller drawing on his
life and career. His work is rich with the sense we all have stories to tell.

Lorraine Toussaint
First role: The Face of Rage, (1983)

You Know Her From: Law & Order, Middle of Nowhere,

Orange Is the New Black
 Be Sure to Check Out: Fast Color, Selma

Lorraine Toussaint picked up her quiet physicality, which

imbues her characters with a steady, solemn presence, in
Japan, where she studied avant-garde Japanese theater and
the classical drama-dance style of Kabuki. She once
explained the craft’s effect to Master Chat: “I really loved
the quality of stillness that this particular sector of Japanese
acting had mastered.” On-camera, she restricts her movements almost exclusively to her head
while her motions below the neck remain minimalist. And rather than fiery or animated
gestures, Toussaint further relies on her eyes to translate the interiority of her characters —
though rarely a romantic lead, her knowing eyes add a sensual tension to her performances.
It’s a perfect combination for the robust authority figures she often plays. During the first six
seasons of Law & Order, for instance, she recurred as Shambala Green, a savvy public
defender who took on cases for women against the DA’s office. On Orange Is the New Black,
she played the manipulative, sociopathic inmate Vee.

A Trinidian American actress, Toussaint credits the speed of her speech, another asset, to the
former-colonized island’s British roots, as the Queen’s English, so to speak, forces otherwise
accented speakers to fully articulate their sounds. Her controlled vocal dynamics further instill
her frequent matriarchal characters with an unshakable aura. During a dinner scene from Ava
DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere, wherein she carefully plots her character’s mood from passive
cynicism to full-throated rage, she rebukes her daughters’ shambled personal lives. And in
Julia Hart’s Fast Color, Toussaint’s best role, she instilled gravitas in three generations of
supernatural women hiding in a dystopian post-apocalyptic town. During the film’s final
scene, wherein she remains behind so her daughter and granddaughter might escape from
governmental clutches, she delivers a defiant gut punch of a monologue and a tender parting
hug to her granddaughter that pulls together all of her skills — her expressive eyes, her
measured speech, her sharp movements — for an empowering, feminine gesture.

Shea Whigham
First role: Of Love & Fantasy (1998)

You Know Him From: Boardwalk Empire, Kong Skull

Island, Fast and Furious
 Be Sure to Check Out: Perry Mason, Wristcutters: A Love
Story, Vampires vs. the Bronx

Born in Tallahassee, Florida, and educated in Texas and

NYC, Shea Whigham just has a vibe about him. It feels as
though he could be from anywhere and everywhere in these
hutterstock
United States. He is regionless. He’s clearly seen some shit.
Since making his feature film debut as a gruff soldier in 2000’s Vietnam War–set Tigerland,
he’s had more than 80 film and TV credits to his name. His film roles vary from a Russian
musician stuck in the limbo of Wristcutters: A Love Story, FBI agent Stasiak in the Fast &
Furious franchise, stoic Captain Earl Cole in Kong Skull Island, astronaut Gus Grissom in
First Man, and everything in between. Yet no matter his character, you get the feeling he’s
spent a lifetime with them. He knows when their first kiss was, who’s waiting for them at
home, if someone is even waiting for them.

Although he has plenty of roles in contemporary-set works, he excels in period pieces. At

times, Whigham almost feels as though he stepped right out of a 1930s gangster picture or
1940s film noir. We saw this with his breakout performance as Nucky Thompson’s conflicted
younger brother Elias “Eli” Thompson on Boardwalk Empire, where he held his own against
Steve Buscemi’s towering signature performance. He’s similarly made characters from the past
feel lived-in and real in shows like Agent Carter and most recently in Perry Mason. In both
shows he played what could have been stock characters — the head of a government agency
and a wise-cracking gumshoe — but Whigham brought an interiority to them. With every line
uttered, with every glance, with every weary sigh or leering joke, you feel like these men have
been through things harder than what they’re going through now. They’ve seen the worst of
humanity through war and the Great Depression, and you can see the ghosts haunting their
every waking minute. Whigham’s characters, more than anything, just want to be left alone.
Fortunately for us, no one is willing to do that.

Isiah Whitlock, Jr.

First Role: A Christmas Carol (1981)

You Know Him From: The Wire, Da Five Bloods, and other
Spike Lee projects

Be Sure to Check Out: All Square, Your Honor

 One of Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s greatest achievements as an actor
is shit. Or rather, “Sheeeeee-it,” the expletive that became a
catchphrase for his character from The Wire, the slick-as-
hot-oil Maryland senator Clay Davis. When Whitlock says
shit, he stretches it out like a piece of profane taffy. Under
his control, it’s a long, long slug of whiskey or a gnarly
extended guitar solo. It’s not just a curse word, it’s an
experience.

But let us not reduce Whitlock to just, well, sheeeeee-it. He has more than 100 credits on his
résumé, and he has appeared in so many shows and films you love — 25th Hour, Chappelle’s
Show, Enchanted, Veep, Atlanta, 12 (!) roles across the Law & Order franchises — that it’s
overwhelming to try and list them all. Whenever Whitlock appears onscreen, he’s magnetic;
his capacity to be charming or a bit of a snake (or both!) enables him to steal scenes when he’s
not even trying.

Watch

Early in his career, Whitlock had a very small part in GoodFellas as a doctor who convinces
Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill to pause for a checkup during his paranoid afternoon of watching
helicopters chase him. In his few seconds onscreen, he establishes one of his great skills as an
actor: an ability to persuade. No matter who he is playing, he’s always able to convince or
cajole, to offer a hand you want to shake even if you suspect his other hand is yoinking your
wallet straight from your backpocket.

Benedict Wong
First role: Screenplay (1992)

You Know Him From: Doctor Strange, Prometheus, The

Martian

Be Sure to Check Out: Annihilation, Moon, Dirty Pretty

Things

Benedict Wong has come a long way from his bit

appearances as “Chinese Man” and “Chinese Interpreter” in
the ’90s. His more recent TV roles include the 13th-century
figure Kublai Khan in Marco Polo and National Crime agent
Shaun Li in the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation.”
The British Chinese actor is now best known for his part in the Marvel Universe as Wong, the
librarian of Kamar-Taj and teacher to Doctor Strange, in multiple films. It takes a special kind
of actor to appear in such mainstream, big-budget works and retain the quintessential
character-actor vibe, and he imbues the character ( who was depicted as an exoticized
manservant in the original comic books) with an appealing mix of dry humor and a no-
nonsense attitude.

Wong excels in science-fiction films and made memorable appearances in Duncan Jones’s
Moon, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (also written by Garland), and
two Ridley Scott films, The Martian and Prometheus. In a standout Prometheus moment, he
tells Idris Elba, “All due respect, captain, you’re a shit pilot” — and even Elba’s suavity is no
match for Wong’s deadpan ability to tell it like it is. It’s the kind of material that could be
boilerplate or even an afterthought but is considerably more fun to watch in the hands of a
capable and good-humored performer like Wong, whose droll, lowercase Twitter bio reads “an
actor in progress.” That clear lack of ego is part of his charm.

Respondents: Carlos Aguilar, Mica Arbeiter, Ashley Avis, Angelica Jade Bastién, Ally Beans,
Nikole Beckwith, Abbey Bender, Dan Callahan, Monica Castillo, Jen Chaney, Daniel
D’Addario, Stephen Dunn, Bilge Ebiri, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, David Fear, Paul Feig,
Jonathan S. Frakes, Caroline Framke, Julio Vincent Gambuto, Risa Bramon Garcia, Marya E.
Gates, Leah Greenblatt, Daniel Goldhaber, Karen Han, Paul Harrill, Alison Herman, Jordan
Hoffman, Inkoo Kang, Gayle Keller, Danny King, Marjorie Lecker, Michelle Lewitt, Shawn
Levy, Deepa Mehta, Pavan Moondi, Mike P. Nelson, Kelly Oxford, Peggy Rajski, Dan Sallitt,
Alena Smith, Doreen St. Félix, Ilona Smyth, Brian Tallerico, Meredith Tucker, Kathryn
VanArendonk, Katie Walsh, Alissa Wilkinson

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