Chris Bauer

Chris Bauer is a stage actor who fell into a very particular television career. He played Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and originated roles in plays by David Mamet, John Patrick Shanley and Jez Butterworth, and that training shows up on screen as an unusual stillness. He does not push.

His face belongs to prestige television. Frank Sobotka in The Wire, the union boss watching his docks die, is the role strangers stop him for, and it is not among the credits listed here; neither is The Deuce nor For All Mankind. What is here is Andy Bellefleur in True Blood, a sweaty, humiliated small-town deputy Bauer plays with far more sympathy than the writing strictly required, and Fred Yokas in Third Watch.

In film he is the man in the doorway holding a badge or a clipboard, and he makes the type specific rather than generic: an investigator in Sully, a police lieutenant in Money Monster, a detective in The Little Things, a heavy in Face/Off, a defendant in The Devil's Advocate. None of those parts are large. All of them are exact.

The recent work has let him be nastier and funnier. He is Joe McCarthy in Fellow Travelers, played without turning him into a cartoon; Wild Bill in Heels, a wrestling veteran with real pathos underneath the showmanship; and one of the Watergate burglars in Gaslit. Thirty years in, he remains one of the most quietly employable actors in America.