Christopher Cousins
Christopher Cousins is an actor, born 1960.
Cousins has been working in television since 1986, and his career has the shape of the American guest star: one long soap opera run, then decades of recurring parts on other people's shows. The soap was One Life to Live, where he played the conman Cain Rogan across forty-one episodes.
The part that travels is Ted Beneke, thirteen episodes of Breaking Bad spread between 2009 and 2012. Ted is the kind of role most actors quietly improve. In a series full of dangerous men he would be easy to play as charming, or as secretly sinister, and either choice would let the audience enjoy him. Cousins does neither. He plays Ted flat, decent, evasive and faintly pathetic, refusing every flourish that might buy sympathy, and that refusal is why a supporting character in thirteen scattered episodes is the first thing anyone mentions about him.
Everything else is a variation on authority under pressure. Seven episodes as Victor Doyle on Revolution, Robert Lindus on Terriers, Gary on UnREAL, Ken Patterson on the Training Day series, David Williams in Untraceable, Bill Mason in a Christmas movie. His filmography also carries a run of early-career horror and thrillers, from Hell High to The Grudge 2. It is a career built on being credible in a suit for three scenes at a time, which is an unglamorous skill and a genuinely rare one: most of these parts exist to be believed rather than remembered, and he has been believed for forty years.
Movies (10)
TV (11)
Where to start with Christopher Cousins
Nobody arrives at this page except through Breaking Bad, and the sensible thing is to watch the Ted Beneke scenes as a set, back to back, for how little he asks you to like him.
For a fuller role, Terriers is the pick: one season, cancelled far too early, and one of the better shaggy detective shows of its decade. Revolution gave him seven episodes of network menace, and UnREAL put him inside a series about reality television that was nastier than the thing it was satirising. On film he is mostly a shape in the frame, though Wicker Park and Untraceable both cast him as exactly the unremarkable professional their plots require. The Grudge 2 is the horror credit, and Check Inn to Christmas is there if you want to see the far end of the range.
Breaking Bad and the dramas
Ted Beneke is thirteen episodes of a man being pathetic in a way that turns out to matter enormously to the plot, and everyone remembers him. Terriers is the cancelled cult show worth digging out.
The films
The film work is thin and mostly supporting, which is the usual shape after two decades of television. Untraceable and Wicker Park are the biggest of them and neither asks a great deal.
The recent television
Steady guest work across American network and cable, which is what a career looks like after a part that memorable. Training Day and UnREAL are the better-written of the recent ones.