Tony Hale

Tony Hale was born in 1970 in West Point, New York, and did not become famous until he was thirty-three, when Arrested Development cast him as Buster Bluth in 2003. He stayed with that part, on and off, through revivals and network changes, until 2019.

His specialty is very precise: men who have been organised into helplessness by somebody stronger. Buster is a grown man kept in a state of arrested infancy by his mother. Gary Walsh on Veep is a personal aide who carries the bag, remembers the names, and treats proximity to power as a substitute for having any, a performance that won Hale supporting-actor Emmys in 2013 and 2015. Both are physical creations before they are verbal ones. Watch what he does with his shoulders when someone raises their voice near him: the whole body flinches half an inch and then pretends it did not. Hale plays panic as posture, and he is generous with it, because the flinch is always feeding somebody else's line.

The second career is voice work, and it is built on the same nerve. Forky in Toy Story 4 is a plastic spork having an existential crisis. Fear in Inside Out 2 is anxiety given a job title. In between he takes small, straight parts in serious films, a television producer in Being the Ricardos, the oily game-show host in Woman of the Hour, and plays them with the twitching switched off, which is worth noticing.