Dave Franco

Dave Franco spent his early career on small parts and a famous surname: a soccer player in Superbad, a friend in Charlie St. Cloud, a season of Scrubs after the show had already replaced its cast. 21 Jump Street in 2012 was the break, and it worked because he understood the assignment exactly, playing the impossibly nice high school kid whose niceness is itself the joke.

He has a specific comic register, smug and slightly wounded at the same time, and the better films know what to do with it. Neighbors gives him a fraternity vice president with genuine ambitions. The Disaster Artist casts him as the sane man narrating someone else's delusion, and it is his best screen performance, largely because he plays reaction rather than comedy. The Now You See Me films use him as the physical one, and Nerve and Warm Bodies fill out the young-leading-man decade.

The more interesting turn came behind the camera. He directed The Rental in 2020, a lean horror film about two couples in a holiday house, starring his wife Alison Brie, and it is a controlled debut with none of the flailing that usually marks an actor's first feature. He has alternated since, taking odder supporting jobs in things like Love Lies Bleeding and Together while building a directing career that looks considerably more deliberate than the acting one ever did.