Dermot Mulroney

Dermot Mulroney arrived in 1988 with two films and a face the industry immediately misread. Young Guns cast him as a western hand, Sunset gave him his debut the same year, and for the next decade Hollywood kept trying to make him a romantic lead: Career Opportunities, Point of No Return, Bad Girls, How to Make an American Quilt. My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) remains his biggest hit and he is the least interesting thing in it, which is not his fault. The part is a prize, not a person.

What he is actually good at is discomfort. Give Mulroney a man with something to hide and the performance changes gear. He is very effective in small doses in Zodiac and Burn After Reading, and he understood precisely what About Schmidt needed: a waterbed salesman the audience is invited to find intolerable, played with total sincerity and no wink at all.

The second act is the interesting one. Rather than fading he became one of the most prolific working actors in American film and television, past a hundred credits, moving between horror (Insidious: Chapter 3, Scream VI, Umma), prestige television (Shameless, Homecoming, Hanna, Secret Invasion), studio comedy (Anyone But You, Dirty Grandpa) and the occasional real part (August: Osage County, The Grey). He is also a musician, which is the line of his biography that never makes the poster.

There is something clarifying about a career shaped like this. Mulroney stopped being sold as a leading man somewhere in the 2000s and the work got better for it. He is now the actor you hire when a scene needs an adult who might be dangerous.