Chris Klein
Chris Klein is an actor, born 1979.
Chris Klein, born in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1979, had one of the better opening years an actor can get. His first screen credit was a supporting part in Election (1999), Paul Metzler, the popular kid too decent to understand the campaign happening around him. The same year he played Chris "Oz" Ostreicher in American Pie.
Oz is the reason that film has aged better than its genre. Klein plays sincerity completely straight, with no wink and no ironic distance, so the one character in a raunchy teen comedy who actually likes the girl he is pursuing reads as a person rather than a punchline. He did the same trick with Second Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan in We Were Soldiers (2002) and, in a broader register, with Dusty Dinkleman in Just Friends (2005), where the earnestness becomes the joke.
The leading-man phase did not take. Rollerball (2002) and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) were vehicles built for a bigger star and they did not do him any favours, and for a stretch the parts thinned out to the kind of credits actors survive rather than build on.
The recovery has been on television, and it suits him. Orlin Dwyer, the Cicada of The Flash, is the best thing he has done since the nineties: heavy, tired, and given none of the sparkle the show usually hands its antagonists. He also has a run as Bill Townsend on Sweet Magnolias and came back one more time as Oz for American Reunion.
Movies (20)
- American Pie (1999)
- American Pie 2 (2001)
- American Reunion (2012)
- We Were Soldiers (2002)
- Fear Street: Prom Queen (2025)
- Just Friends (2005)
- The Valley of Light (2007)
- Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)
- Election (1999)
- Rollerball (2002)
- The United States of Leland (2003)
- Day Zero (2007)
- American Dreamz (2006)
- The Long Weekend (2005)
- Here on Earth (2000)
- Authors Anonymous (2014)
- Say It Isn't So (2001)
- American Pie: Revealed (2004)
- The Six Wives of Henry Lefay (2009)
- Benchwarmers 2: Breaking Balls (2019)
TV (5)
Where to start with Chris Klein
Start with American Pie, and watch what Klein is doing rather than what the film is doing. He is the only person on screen playing the emotion honestly, and the movie needs that anchor more than it admits.
Then Election, where the joke is that his character has no idea he is in a satire. It is a small part in a much better film, and the two performances together tell you exactly what he is for. We Were Soldiers is the serious version of the same quality, Just Friends the silly one.
For his current work, The Flash is the argument: as Cicada he is heavy, tired and genuinely unpleasant, which nobody expected. American Reunion is for completists, and Rollerball is only worth your time as a case study in how a career goes sideways.