Toby Huss

Huss has two careers and they barely overlap. One is a voice: Artie on The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Todd on Beavis and Butt-Head and both of its films, and on King of the Hill, Kahn and Cotton Hill in the original run and then Dale Gribble in the revival. Playing three unrelated men in the same series across decades is a strange and specific skill.

The other career is his face, which looks like it was assembled in a machine shop in Iowa and which directors have used for cops, foremen, deputies and menacing dads since the mid-nineties. He is very good at one particular thing: the American man who is friendly right up to the second he is not. Ray in the 2018 Halloween is a two-scene version. Anthony Lamb in Copshop is the full-length one, a hitman played as a chatty nuisance.

The performance to see is John Bosworth on Halt and Catch Fire. Bos begins the series as a sales bully at a Texas computer company and ends it as its conscience, and Huss plays a decade of a man's life without ever softening the accent or the belligerence into something cuddly. It is the best work of his career by a distance, and it arrived after twenty years of two-scene parts. He has been busy since: Edward Dickinson on Dickinson, Tex on GLOW, Al Yankovic's disapproving father, a part in Weapons.