Chris Diamantopoulos

Christopher Diamantopoulos was working, professionally, at nine. Born in Toronto in 1975 and raised splitting his time between Greece and Canada, he did television commercials and theatre as a child, left home at eighteen for a run of US national tours, and worked his way onto Broadway from there. That stage grounding shows up in the sheer projection of his screen work.

His specialty is the loud, self-satisfied man who stays entertaining instead of merely exhausting. Russ Hanneman on Silicon Valley is the definitive version, a venture billionaire who cannot get through a sentence without valuing himself in it, and the reason the character kept being brought back is that Diamantopoulos plays the neediness under the noise. He can also drop the volume entirely: Clark Ingram on Hannibal is genuinely unpleasant, Sotto Voce in Red Notice is a villain played with a light touch, and Marky Bark on Arrested Development is committed idiocy of a very specific kind. As Moe in The Three Stooges (2012) he attempted a full-body impersonation of a nine-decade-old comic performance, which is a harder job than the film gets credit for. He also had a supporting run on the ninth season of The Office.

The voice career is the half that pays. He has voiced Mickey Mouse across The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and the short Once Upon a Studio, picking up two Emmy nominations for it, and the rest is a long list of animation: Donald on Invincible, ROBOTUS on Inside Job, Evios on Blood of Zeus, Steve Trevor in Justice Society: World War II, plus the Batman Unlimited features and a stack of Diary of a Wimpy Kid specials. Sixty-odd credits and no obvious ceiling on the range.