Mather Zickel
Mather Zickel is an actor.
Mather Zickel is the actor a comedy hires when it needs someone credible. He plays the well-groomed man in the good jacket, either the straight edge the joke is measured against or the thing being satirised, and he has been doing it on film and television since the late 1990s. He is from New York, went to NYU, and came up in the orbit of The State, whose members he has worked with repeatedly, playing Louis La Fonda in both The Ten and Childrens Hospital.
The comic mode is consistent enough to be a signature. Gil in I Love You, Man is the friend whose oversharing curdles a dinner party. Jim Stansel in Wanderlust is the smug success story. Richard Caldwell in Younger, James in Suburbicon and How to Be a Latin Lover, Dr. Frederick Gardner in Forever: variations on composure with something faintly wrong underneath it.
Rachel Getting Married is the outlier and the reason to take him seriously. In Jonathan Demme's handheld, deliberately ragged family drama he plays Kieran with none of the polish the comedies rely on, and the loose shooting style leaves him nowhere to hide. It is the clearest evidence that the smooth surface is a tool rather than a limit.
He has kept working in both registers since, from the horror anthology Southbound to a newsreader in The Fantastic 4: First Steps.
Movies (13)
- The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025)
- Rachel Getting Married (2008)
- Suburbicon (2017)
- Southbound (2015)
- I Love You, Man (2009)
- Wanderlust (2012)
- How to Be a Latin Lover (2017)
- Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (2026)
- The Ten (2007)
- Coming & Going (2011)
- Alma & the Wolf (2025)
- Organ Trail (2023)
- Diggers (2007)
TV (8)
Where to start with Mather Zickel
The place to start is the exception, Rachel Getting Married. Demme's film is a shouting match of a family wedding shot like a home movie, and Zickel plays the one person in it who is trying to be careful. Watch it before the comedies, because it will change what you notice in them.
Then go to I Love You, Man for the widest-seen version of his comic register, and The Ten and Childrens Hospital for Louis La Fonda, the same character played twice in the sketch tradition he came from. Masters of Sex is the best of the prestige television, Younger the most enjoyable of the light television, and Reno 911! the earliest evidence that he was always funnier than his haircut suggested. Southbound is the one genuine genre swing, and Suburbicon and The Fantastic 4: First Steps are the big productions where you will spot him in passing.