Chris Perfetti
Chris Perfetti is an actor, born 1988.
Perfetti spent a decade taking good small parts before a network sitcom made him a familiar face. Tim Fletch on Crossbones and Brady on Looking were the early television, and Brady in particular, the boyfriend nobody in the friend group entirely enjoyed, was written to be abrasive; Perfetti made him sympathetic without softening a single line.
The comic instrument is very precise. As Jacob Hill on Abbott Elementary he plays a young white teacher whose earnestness is a permanent, low-grade social emergency, and the joke only works because Perfetti plays the sincerity absolutely straight: Jacob means every excruciating thing he says. The role brought a Critics' Choice Award nomination and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
The film work runs colder. He is Harlan in Sound of Metal, Eric in Minyan, the motel clerk in The Virtuoso, and George in Twinless, the most substantial screen role he has had outside the sitcom, while Looking: The Movie closed out the HBO series. The pattern across all of it is consistent: he takes characters written as an irritant and finds the person underneath without ever asking you to forgive them.
Movies (5)
TV (4)
Where to start with Chris Perfetti
Most people meet him through Abbott Elementary, which is a legitimately great sitcom performance to meet anyone through. Jacob would be intolerable in life and is a gift on screen, largely because Perfetti never signals that he is in on the joke.
Then go to Looking, which is the opposite assignment. Brady is written to grate, and Perfetti plays him as a man who is right about most things and unbearable about all of them, which is much harder than it looks. Sound of Metal and Minyan are the small, serious film credits worth your time, and Twinless is the recent one to watch if you want to see what he does with something close to a lead. Looking: The Movie is for finishing what you started.