Gus Halper
Gus Halper is an actor, born 1992.
Gus Halper is a New York actor, born in 1992, who drew the sort of first major role that either makes a career or swallows it. In Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders he played Erik Menendez, a real person inside one of the most replayed trials in American television, which leaves an actor nowhere to hide behind interpretation.
Before that he was a stage actor, including the 2016 off-Broadway run of the musical Ride the Cyclone as Mischa Bachinski, with small film parts filling the gaps: a traveller in Ricki and the Flash, a fraternity member in Goat, a hazing film that is difficult to watch on purpose.
The work since has settled into a specific kind of television character: young men with something coiled up in them. Mikey Scaramucci in HAPPY!, Joseph Lyman in Dickinson, Neal in Jett, Danny in Love Life, Teddy Silas in Law & Order: Organized Crime. He also appeared in Fear the Walking Dead in 2021, which is not among the credits listed here. On film he is Anton in Cold Pursuit and Tom in Rustin, the Bayard Rustin biopic, and the pattern across all of it is that he gets cast when a production needs someone plausible rather than someone charming.
Movies (4)
TV (6)
Where to start with Gus Halper
The obvious first stop is Law & Order True Crime, and it earns the position. The series has its lurid moments, but his half of it is unusually restrained for a network true-crime dramatisation, and it is the only thing here built around him.
Then Goat, which is the harder watch and the better film, and Rustin for the opposite reason: a large, warm ensemble piece where he is one small moving part in a very good cast. Dickinson is where he is funniest, since that show treats period drama as a costume rather than a rulebook. HAPPY! is the strangest thing on the list by a wide margin, and Cold Pursuit is worth it for the deadpan tone more than for his share of it.