Wallace Langham
Wallace Langham is an actor, born 1965.
Wallace Langham began working in 1985 under the stage name Wally Ward, which is how he is billed as one of the Weenies in Weird Science and as Archie in The Chocolate War, and he reverted to his own name in 1989. James Wallace Langham II has been steadily employed ever since, almost entirely in the second tier of the call sheet, which is a career type that barely exists any more.
His specialty is the smug subordinate: the man who is cleverer than his job and cannot stop letting you know. Phil, the head writer on The Larry Sanders Show between 1992 and 1998, is the sourest version, resentment refined into a professional manner. David Hodges on CSI is the calibrated version, smug enough to be funny and never quite enough to be tiresome, and he played it across the show's long run and again in CSI: Vegas. In between came Josh Blair on Veronica's Closet and Stewart on NewsRadio.
The film work is a long list of two-scene parts, and lately a surprising number of real people: Saul Bass in Hitchcock, Aaron Spelling in My Dinner with Herve, Senator Estes Kefauver in The Alto Knights, Gordon Caplan in Operation Varsity Blues. He is Kirby in Little Miss Sunshine, Warren in Ruby Sparks, Dr. Strauss in Transcendence, Dr. Granger in Ford v Ferrari, and he turns up in The Social Network too. None of these are leads. All of them are the kind of small precise work that makes a film feel populated.
Movies (24)
- Ford v Ferrari (2019)
- Taken 3 (2014)
- War Dogs (2016)
- Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
- Transcendence (2014)
- The Darkest Minds (2018)
- The Alto Knights (2025)
- Daddy Day Care (2003)
- Weird Science (1985)
- Vital Signs (1990)
- Michael (1996)
- Ruby Sparks (2012)
- Battle of the Sexes (2017)
- Soul Man (1986)
- Hitchcock (2012)
- The Great Buck Howard (2008)
- My Dinner with Hervé (2018)
- I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006)
- The Chocolate War (1988)
- Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal (2021)
- On Edge (2001)
- Buttwhistle (2014)
- Somewhere Slow (2013)
- Combat Academy (1986)
TV (18)
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000)
- The Rookie: Feds (2022)
- The Larry Sanders Show (1992)
- CSI: Vegas (2021)
- Pepper Ann (1997)
- Perry Mason (2020)
- NewsRadio (1995)
- Veronica's Closet (1997)
- Physical (2021)
- Beware the Batman (2013)
- Glenn Martin, DDS (2009)
- Miss Match (2003)
- Life with Louie (1994)
- Heathers (2018)
- Mission Hill (1999)
- Madman of the People (1994)
- Inside Schwartz (2001)
- Fast Times (1986)
Where to start with Wallace Langham
The Larry Sanders Show is the origin and still the best of him. Phil is written as a bitter man in a job he is too good for, and Langham plays the bitterness dry rather than broad, which is why it is funny thirty years later.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is the volume job and rewards dipping rather than bingeing, since Hodges works best as an irritant in someone else's episode. Pick a middle season, watch him needle the lab, move on.
On film, Hitchcock gives him Saul Bass and about four minutes to make a designer interesting, and he does. Little Miss Sunshine and Ruby Sparks are the small comic parts done properly. My Dinner with Hervé is the underseen one. Perry Mason shows the late period, where he mostly plays men in good suits saying no. Weird Science is where it started, under a different name.