Fisher Stevens

Fisher Stevens, born Stephen Fisher in Chicago in 1963, has had two careers and only one of them tends to come up. The first is as a character actor with a face built for weasels, informers and lawyers. The second is as a documentary producer and director who owns an Academy Award.

The acting break was Short Circuit in 1986 and its 1988 sequel, in which he played Ben Jabituya, an Indian scientist, in brown makeup. It made him famous and it is the least defensible thing on an otherwise interesting record. What he turned out to be good at, once the eighties were over, is playing men who are slightly ahead of the room and enjoying it far too much. The Plague in Hackers is a corporate security officer who skateboards through an office and is the most nineties villain ever committed to film. Marvin Gerard in The Blacklist is a lawyer with no visible conscience, stretched across most of the show's run. Hugo Baker in Succession is the best of them, a senior executive whose only function is to survive the meeting, played as a physical condition rather than a personality.

The other career is more serious. He produced The Cove, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and directed Crazy Love and Before the Flood; he also directed the 2021 drama Palmer. Meanwhile Wes Anderson keeps hiring him, in The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs and beyond, which is the surest sign that people who cast for texture know exactly what he provides.