Dan Butler
Dan Butler is an actor, born 1954.
Butler has been in two Thomas Harris adaptations playing two different forensic technicians. He is Jimmy Price, the fingerprint man in Michael Mann's Manhunter, and Roden, one of the pair of insect specialists in the Smithsonian basement in The Silence of the Lambs. Neither part is large and both are the kind of scene that has to be completely convincing or the film stops working.
Television made him famous with the opposite quality. Bulldog Briscoe on Frasier is loud, coarse and entirely out of place in a show about two men arguing over sherry, and the performance keeps finding the insecurity underneath the volume, which is why the character lasted eleven years and came back in 2024. On Hey Arnold! he voiced Mr. Simmons, the endlessly encouraging teacher, so a generation knows him as the kindest adult on children's television without knowing the face. He also played Art on Roseanne in the early 1990s.
The rest is a working character actor's resume with more range than the sitcom suggests: Walter in Longtime Companion, one of the first American films to take the AIDS crisis seriously; Gene Kranz in From the Earth to the Moon; a minister in Prayers for Bobby; an agency man in Enemy of the State; an agent in Blonde.
Movies (16)
- Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
- Enemy of the State (1998)
- Blonde (2022)
- Rising Sun (1993)
- The Fan (1996)
- Sniper 2 (2002)
- Prayers for Bobby (2009)
- All My Life (2020)
- Captain Ron (1992)
- Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie (2018)
- I Love Trouble (1994)
- The Long Walk Home (1990)
- The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest (2002)
- Longtime Companion (1989)
- Manhunter (1986)
TV (10)
Where to start with Dan Butler
The sitcom is the obvious door. In Frasier, the trick is that Bulldog is written as an irritant and played as a man who knows perfectly well that he is one. Butler makes a broad character specific, which is why he stayed on a show that did not need him.
For the film work, watch Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs back to back. Same author, same profession, two entirely different rooms, and both scenes run on procedural detail delivered like it is ordinary.
Longtime Companion is the serious recommendation and the best acting on this list. Hey Arnold! is the one to put on for children, From the Earth to the Moon gives him a real historical figure at mission control, and Enemy of the State is the slickest use of him in a thriller.