Andrew Rannells

The rent, early on, came from cartoons. Rannells was voicing Streex on Street Sharks in 1994, Archie Andrews in Archie's Weird Mysteries by 1999, and Alexander Hamilton in the educational series Liberty's Kids in 2002, which is a detail that acquired a second life once he later appeared in Hamilton on Broadway.

The stage is where the reputation was made. He originated Elder Kevin Price in The Book of Mormon in 2011, took a Tony nomination for it and won the 2012 Grammy for the cast recording, then earned a second Tony nomination as Whizzer in the Falsettos revival. That performance is the lucky one for viewers at home, since the filmed Falsettos exists and most great musical theatre performances simply do not. Other Broadway credits run from Hairspray through Hedwig and the Angry Inch to Gutenberg.

On screen he became the acid friend, and became very good at it. Elijah in Girls is the template: a man whose defense mechanism is being funnier than everyone in the room, and who lets the seams show at exactly the right moments. That register carried him through The Intern, Why Him, Bachelorette, Black Monday, Welcome to Chippendales and the two Simple Favor films, plus a strong second voice career in Big Mouth and Invincible. The parts that let him drop the armor are the better ones: Larry in The Boys in the Band, and the memoir he published in 2019, which is markedly kinder to everyone in it than his stage persona would suggest.