Eric Balfour

Balfour has one of the most familiar faces in American genre television and has never quite had the show that belongs to him. He debuted in a 1996 Lifetime film, No One Would Tell, worked through the late 1990s in teen parts including Can't Hardly Wait and Trojan War, and then landed three recurring roles that put him in front of very large audiences at once: Gabe Dimas on Six Feet Under, Eddie on The O.C. and Milo Pressman on 24.

His specialty is a likeable unreliability. Balfour plays men you would trust with your car and not with a secret, which is why horror and science fiction kept calling: Kemper in the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, Brad in the survival thriller Backcountry, the lead in Skyline, and Duke Crocker in Haven, the closest thing to a signature part he has had.

Skyline is the interesting failure in the pile, a cheap alien invasion film that looks several times more expensive than it was, with Balfour carrying most of it and getting no credit for doing so. He has kept working across every budget since, from a role in The Offer, the series about the making of The Godfather, to television movies with monsters in the title. The career reads as a long sequence of near misses, and the consistent thing across all of it is that he is better than the material he keeps being handed.