Ethan Suplee

Ethan Suplee was a teenager when Kevin Smith cast him in Mallrats, and the New Jersey films kept calling: Chasing Amy, Dogma, Clerks II, Clerks III. It gave him a career and an instant typecast, the big loud friend, the comic relief at the back of the frame. He was extremely good at it, which is part of the problem.

American History X shows the other setting. Playing Seth at twenty-two, he is genuinely frightening, and it works because he plays the character's stupidity as its own form of violence rather than as a joke to be enjoyed. Directors who ask him for that register tend to get something better than the surrounding film deserves, which is the story of his supporting work in Blow, Cold Mountain, The Wolf of Wall Street, Deepwater Horizon and Motherless Brooklyn.

Television gave him the biggest audience. Randy Hickey in My Name Is Earl ran four seasons and is a sweet, faintly sad creation, an enormous man playing a character with no defences whatsoever. Before that he was Frankie in Boy Meets World; afterwards came The Ranch and Chance. He has kept working into a second act of smaller, stranger films, Manodrome and Dog among them, still cast for his size and still doing something more interesting with it than the casting assumed.