Who is He?

Let's talk about character actors.

Kevin Corrigan at Knickerbocker Bar & Grill on April 18, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Ben Gabbe/Getty Images)

I can only remember Kevin Corrigan’s name four out of seven times, but he’s my ultimate That Guy — a character actor whose presence I am always delighted by. I’m watching a movie or an HBO show and it’s like, Ah yes, thank God he’s here. How long has it been? What have you been up to? I’m so happy you’re in this. He’s so lovely and awkward in Walking and Talking. He’s exactly the kind of fuck-up cousin in The Departed that you recognize instantly, the one you’re nodding along with for fifteen minutes before you realize he’s asking you for money. He was so good — desperate, gregarious, a little unhinged — in Netflix’s two-season Baz Lurhmann show The Get Down. And there are so many more places Corrigan should be: it’s only a matter of time, I think, before he pops up on The Bear. 

There are so many other people about whom I feel this way: J. C. MacKenzie pops up in every other Martin Scorsese movie doing the exact same irascible snob thing and I lap it up every time. CCH Pounder — when have you ever seen CCH Pounder in something and been disappointed? The same goes for Harold Perrineau, although he should be a leading man. Tom Hollander, of course. (It feels cruel — crazy! — that he was never on Succession, even in some small way.) Danny Huston … the voice … the eyebrows … the smile … like I see him in something and yeah that’s my man. (None of this applies to Richard Kind who gets a different designation, which is just “Richard Kind.”)

Who’s that person for you? I want to stick to character actors or maybe less famous people — this is arbitrary but let’s say they cannot be any more famous than Patricia Clarkson or Greg Kinnear. I’ll be chiming in all week, for as long as there are replies!