Corbin Bernsen

American network television in the 1980s needed someone to play the handsome man you should not trust, and Bernsen took the job and made a forty-year career out of it. He started with bit parts, a reporter in the 1976 King Kong, then S.O.B. and Hello Again, and then L.A. Law arrived in 1986 and made him famous as divorce attorney Arnie Becker.

The type was set: polished, pleased with himself, entirely comfortable being disliked. Major League used it in 1989 for Roger Dorn, a part he played across two more films, and The Dentist turned the same surface into horror, casting him as Dr. Alan Feinstone and then bringing him back for a sequel. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang got the sharpest version of it out of him as Harlan Dexter, and Tales from the Hood the ugliest, as the racist politician of its Klan segment.

The second act is warmer. From 2006 he played Henry Spencer on Psych, a retired police detective and the hardest man in California to impress, which turned out to be the best thing he has ever done, and he carried it through three follow-up films. Recent television has kept him busy: The Punisher, The Resident, City on a Hill, Magnum P.I., The Curse, The Kominsky Method as himself, Duster, Your Friends and Neighbors.

He is also a director, and he works constantly at every budget level, including a long tail of creature features and direct-to-video thrillers that most actors of his standing would decline. He does not appear to decline anything, and that is its own kind of professionalism.