Gerald McRaney

Gerald McRaney spent two decades as a network leading man. Simon & Simon made him a private detective in 1981, Major Dad made him a Marine with a family in 1989, and Promised Land kept him in wholesome primetime through the 1990s. That is a specific kind of fame: the man millions of people trusted every week without ever thinking about it.

Then Deadwood happened, and it is the best thing anybody ever did with him. Cast as George Hearst, the mining magnate who arrives late in the series, McRaney plays the most frightening man in a show full of killers, and he does it almost entirely through courtesy. Hearst is never loud. He simply explains what is going to happen next, in the voice of a decent American father, and the town rearranges itself around him. Every year of network likeability is doing work in that performance.

The rest of his late career runs on that discovery. Raymond Tusk in House of Cards, Red Bama Sr. in Shooter, Johnston Green in Jericho, Barlow in Longmire, Ed Thune in Santa Clarita Diet, Admiral Kilbride on NCIS: Los Angeles, Randolph Murdaugh in a 2025 dramatisation of that family. He won a Primetime Emmy for guest actor in a drama for Dr. Nathan Katowski in This Is Us, a role assembled almost entirely out of bedside manner. He has been at this since the 1970s, an episode of The Incredible Hulk included, and he has not stopped.