Andre Royo

Bubbles is one of the great television performances, and it belongs to an actor who was doing bit parts right up until it landed: Tattoo in Shaft is a 2000 credit, The Wire arrives in 2002. Royo plays a man living at the bottom of the Baltimore drug economy, and the reason the character lands is that he never lets hardship stand in for a personality. Bubbles is funny, resourceful, self-aware and exhausting to himself, and all four exist in the same scene without Royo signposting which one you are supposed to feel sorry for.

What followed is a study in what a defining role does and does not unlock. He has worked constantly since and been central almost never: Thirsty Rawlings on Empire, Henry Arliss Higgins on Fringe, Scott on Party Down, supporting parts across a long list of independent films. He is frequently the best thing in a scene he has three minutes of. The Spectacular Now uses him properly, as a teacher who is neither wise nor useless, and he turns up at the edges of both Beautiful Boy and To Leslie, films about people coming apart, playing the person who has already seen this before.

He also produces and writes, and the genre corner of his filmography has grown: Oruf in Prospect, and coming parts in The Punisher: One Last Kill and Man of Tomorrow. The through-line is that directors trust him with the register most actors overplay, the one where somebody has seen the worst of a situation already and is not going to perform shock for the audience's benefit.