Justin Kirk
Justin Kirk is an actor, born 1969.
Prior Walter is one of the hardest parts in American theatre, and in 2003 Kirk played it on television. Angels in America asks an actor to be funny, furious, physically failing and theatrically grand inside the same scene, and he held all of it. The Primetime Emmy nomination for supporting actor followed.
What he does better than almost anyone is sarcasm with a floor under it. His default delivery is dry to the point of rudeness, and the trick is that you can always hear the hurt sitting underneath, which is why the jokes do not curdle. Andy Botwin across the run of Weeds, from 2005 to 2012, is the long demonstration: a character with no discipline and no cruelty, written to be the comic relief in a show about a criminal enterprise, and played as the only person in it with a conscience.
Since then he has been a reliable one-scene killer in films, Jay in Molly's Game and Scooter Libby in Vice, and a recurring pleasure on television. Charlie Bingham on Modern Family, Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason, Peter on Kidding, Tad on Ghosts, and Raglan James on Interview with the Vampire, a part he carries into The Vampire Lestat. He has voiced Hal Jordan in Justice League: War. Network vehicles like Animal Practice and APB put him at the front of a show, and neither is what anybody remembers him for, which says more about network casting than about him.
Movies (14)
TV (14)
Where to start with Justin Kirk
Angels in America is the reason to be here. A long, starry miniseries, and Kirk carries the emotional center of it against Al Pacino and Meryl Streep without being flattened. Watch that first and everything else reads differently.
Then Weeds, which is a wildly uneven show with one consistently excellent performance in it. Andy starts as a joke and becomes the moral weather, and Kirk does most of that work in throwaway line readings. For the film side, Molly's Game gives him a couple of scenes of pure dry venom and Vice uses his stillness for something colder. Perry Mason is the best of the recent television, a period courtroom show that suits his register. Interview with the Vampire and Justice League: War round it out for the genre crowd.