Mykelti Williamson

For thirty years the first line in any introduction to Mykelti Williamson has been Bubba Blue, which is a strange thing to be famous for: a young man who talks about shrimp, played so straight and so warmly that a whole film's idea of friendship rests on him. He was already a working actor by then, with a rock and roll picture and a couple of studio comedies behind him.

What followed is one of the more useful careers in American film. He is the actor directors hire when a scene needs an adult standing in it: a detective across the table from Al Pacino's crew in Heat, a diabetic convict in Con Air whose failing body is the plot's clock, a colonel in Three Kings, Don King in Ali. Small parts, all of them credible, none of them showy.

The exception, and the performance to see, is Gabriel Maxson in Fences. He had played the role on stage in the Broadway revival before Denzel Washington filmed it, and it shows: Gabriel is a wounded man treated as a holy fool by everyone around him, and Williamson plays him without a trace of condescension or pleading. Television has given him the longer runs, as the Kentucky butcher Ellstin Limehouse in Justified, and in Boomtown, 24, Chicago P.D. and Lethal Weapon. He works constantly, and the through line is that he never asks a scene for more room than it has.