Kurt Fuller

Kurt Fuller is the actor you have seen sixty times and have never once looked up. He graduated from Berkeley in 1976 and has worked steadily since the late 1980s, almost always as the man in the suit standing between the heroes and what they want.

His specialty is officiousness, and he does it without ever making the character stupid. In Ghostbusters II he is Jack Hardemeyer, the mayor's aide, whose obstruction is entirely rational from inside his own job description. In Wayne's World he is Russell, the executive's fixer, running around with a clipboard and no real authority. In Scary Movie he plays the sheriff as a man who genuinely cannot follow what is happening. The joke in a Fuller performance is rarely that he is a buffoon; it is that he brings procedural seriousness to a situation that does not deserve any.

Television has been kinder to him than film. As Coroner Woody Strode on Psych from 2009 to 2014 he got room to build something looser and stranger, a medical examiner with no filter and a suspiciously eventful private life, and it is the closest thing he has to a signature role. Zachariah on Supernatural is the other one, an angel played with the smugness of middle management, which is precisely the right idea. He has also worked for Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris and Taylor Hackford in Ray. He is the kind of hire that makes a scene click without anyone in the audience knowing why.