Joe Pantoliano

Joe Pantoliano was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1951 and has played more than a hundred and fifty roles across film, television and theatre. He is one of those actors whose face is more famous than his name, and the reason is that he owns a very particular character: the small operator, the guy calculating his own odds while everyone else is having a conversation.

He does the calculation visibly, which is the trick. Watch him as Guido in Risky Business or Francis in The Goonies and you can see a man weighing what he can get away with, half a second ahead of the line. As Cypher in The Matrix he plays exhaustion rather than villainy, a man tired of being right about the wrong thing, and it is the most sympathetic reading anyone could have given that part. Teddy in Memento works because he is genuinely warm and you cannot tell what that warmth is for. He has been Captain Howard across four Bad Boys films spanning nearly thirty years, which makes him one of very few actors to hold a franchise role that long.

The Emmy came from television, for Ralph Cifaretto on The Sopranos, a character so unpleasant that the show has to keep finding new ways to punish the audience for enjoying him, and Pantoliano plays him as a joker who cannot read a room. It is the clearest demonstration of what he does, because the comedy and the menace are the same performance, and neither one is applied on top of the other.