Christian Kane
Christian Kane is an actor, born 1972.
Christian Kane came out of Dallas with a face built for network television and spent the early 2000s in the parts that implies: the rival fiance in Just Married, a federal agent in Taxi, the young version of Robert Duvall's character in Secondhand Lions, brisk supporting turns in Summer Catch and Life or Something Like It. What kept him working was a specialty nobody was casting for by name. He could play a bad man you liked.
Angel found it first. Lindsey McDonald was written as a corporate lawyer for a firm of demons, which is a joke premise, and Kane played him with enough real hurt underneath that the show kept bringing him back and eventually let him be dangerous.
The two long-running roles came later. Eliot Spencer in Leverage is the muscle in a crew of thieves, and the show's best running joke is that the most violent man in it is also the one who cooks; Kane carried him through the 2021 revival Leverage: Redemption. Jake Stone in The Librarians is the other, an Oklahoma roughneck hiding an art history education, and he returned to the part for The Librarians: The Next Chapter.
He is also a singer-songwriter, and the country-rock side of the career is not a hobby bolted on afterwards. It is a large part of why the cowboy roles in Into the West and Crossfire Trail sit on him so comfortably.
Movies (16)
- Taxi (2004)
- Secondhand Lions (2003)
- Just Married (2003)
- Crossfire Trail (2001)
- Friday Night Lights (2004)
- Life or Something Like It (2002)
- Summer Catch (2001)
- Christmas in the Heartland (2017)
- The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy (2000)
- 50 to 1 (2014)
- Love Song (2000)
- The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron (2003)
- The Terror of Hallow's Eve (2017)
- Her Minor Thing (2005)
- Not Since You (2009)
- All-Stars (2014)
TV (8)
Where to start with Christian Kane
Start where his fanbase started, with Leverage, specifically because Eliot Spencer is far better written than a hitter with a heart needs to be. The fights are shot to make him look competent rather than superhuman, and the comedy comes from how badly he wants to avoid discussing his feelings. Leverage: Redemption picks it up more than a decade on and is warmer than it has any right to be.
Angel is the other essential, because Lindsey McDonald is the role that proved Kane got more interesting the harder the writing worked against him.
After that, The Librarians is the light, silly, endlessly rewatchable one, continued in The Librarians: The Next Chapter. Among the films, Secondhand Lions is the sweetest thing he appears in and Crossfire Trail is the one where he simply gets to be a cowboy. Just Married is perfectly fine, and he is the antagonist of it.