Joe Mantello
A Tony nomination for a Broadway debut is an unusual way to begin. Mantello got one, for Best Featured Actor in a Play, for the original production of Tony Kushner's two-part epic Angels in America across 1993 and 1994, and he has kept going back to the stage since: Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart in 2011, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie in 2017.
What he does on camera is a particular kind of containment. His screen parts tend to be men who have decided in advance how much of themselves to show. In the film of The Normal Heart he is Mickey Marcus, holding a public composure that will not survive the scene. In Hollywood he plays Dick Samuels, doing careful arithmetic about what can be said aloud in a room. In FEUD he plays Jack Dunphy, mostly listening to somebody else's crisis. He does not push. The tension comes from what the character has chosen not to do.
He also directs, and the two halves of the career meet on the 2020 film of Mart Crowley's play The Boys in the Band, which he directed rather than appeared in. His most-watched screen role is probably John Graff in The Watcher, where the same stillness gets used for something colder.
Movies (3)
TV (4)
Where to start with Joe Mantello
Start with Hollywood for the clearest sample of his screen manner: Dick Samuels is a man calculating what he can afford to reveal, and Mantello plays the calculation rather than the feeling underneath it. Then The Normal Heart, where the composure finally gives out and you can see what was being held. FEUD is the drier, smaller version of the same trick.
The Watcher is the outlier and the one most people arrive from, and it puts the stillness to work as menace. If you want the directing instead of the acting, The Boys in the Band is the one: filmed close, staged like the theatre piece it came from, and very well cast. Cookie is an early bit part and inessential.