Wilmer Valderrama

Fez was a great part and a trap. Valderrama played the exchange student on That '70s Show from 1998 to 2006, built the character almost entirely out of an accent, a leer and impeccable comic timing, and then spent the next decade discovering what American casting does with an actor it has already filed. He went back to the role for That '90s Show in 2023, which is either a joke about that fact or a settling of accounts.

The middle years look thin on paper: small parts in Summer Catch, Party Monster, Beauty Shop, Fast Food Nation and Larry Crowne, hosting duties on MTV. What was actually happening is more interesting. He built a second career in a booth, where nobody could cast him by face, voicing Manny in Handy Manny across seven years of children's television, and that work eventually paid out at Disney and Pixar with Agustin in Encanto, Gaxton in Onward and Higgins in Zootopia 2.

The rebuild on screen came through villainy. Carlos Madrigal in From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series gave him menace to play instead of punchlines, and from 2016 he has been Special Agent Nick Torres on NCIS, one of the most watched procedurals on American television, with a crossover run on NCIS: Hawaii. He is not a chameleon and never has been. He is a durable, likeable presence who survived being typecast early, which is rarer and harder than it sounds.