Dan Beirne
Dan Beirne is an actor, born 1982.
Beirne's calling card is a film that is not among these credits: The Twentieth Century, Matthew Rankin's hallucinatory account of Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, for which he won the Vancouver Film Critics Circle award for best actor in a Canadian film and took a Canadian Screen Award nomination. It is one of the strangest lead performances any Canadian actor has given, and nothing else on his record looks remotely like it.
The rest of the time he does a specific and useful thing: he plays the man in the room whose small failure the scene is really about. The character names in his television work tell the story on their own. Social Media Jeff in Gen V. Gary Goldman in Workin' Moms. Nick in Ginny & Georgia. Jeremy in Twisted Metal. These are parts that hold a joke or a plot together while the leads get the close-ups, and he never overplays them.
The Canadian independent scene has served him much better. I Like Movies, White Lie, I Used to Be Funny and Paying for It, where he plays the cartoonist Chester Brown, are small films with real writing in them, and he turns up in all four. Sooner or later somebody is going to build one around him.
Movies (9)
TV (8)
Where to start with Dan Beirne
The best introduction is I Like Movies, a painfully accurate comedy about a teenage video-store obsessive, with Beirne in the supporting cast. It is funny and it stings.
Then Paying for It, where he plays cartoonist Chester Brown in an adaptation of a memoir most filmmakers would not touch, and White Lie, a tight Canadian thriller about a lie getting away from its author. Both are small, both are worth the ninety minutes.
On television, Gen V and Twisted Metal are where you will spot him without looking, and Workin' Moms gives him the most screen time. Priscilla is a Sofia Coppola credit with almost nothing in it, and Ginny & Georgia is the mainstream one. Start with the independent films; the streaming work is rent.