David Costabile

David Costabile was born in Washington, D.C. in 1967, came up through Broadway, and has spent close to thirty years being the actor whose face you know and whose name you do not. Almost all of the significant work is television.

The best argument for him is two roles that share nothing. Gale Boetticher in Breaking Bad is a fastidious, courteous, faintly delighted chemist, a man of enormous competence and no defences, and the gentlest presence that show ever had. Wags in Billions is a bellowing hedonist in a three-piece suit who treats every scene as a party he is hosting. Same actor, same decade, no overlap whatsoever. Most character actors have a register. Costabile appears to have a switchboard.

The rest of the resume is a tour of two decades of prestige American television: The Wire, Damages, Flight of the Conchords, Suits, Better Call Saul, Low Winter Sun. Film uses him more sparingly and usually for authority, a congressman in Lincoln, a lawyer, a doctor, a judge, though a credit reading Biker Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas hints at a more adventurous decade.

He is one of the reasons the golden-age cable drama worked at all. Those shows needed a bench of actors who could make a two-scene part feel like a whole person, and he did it more often than almost anyone.