David Arquette

Television came first for David Arquette, who was born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1971: a main role as Keith Matthews on the Fox version of The Outsiders in 1990, then Tod Hawks on the sitcom Parenthood. His film debut came in Where the Day Takes You in 1992, and he had leads in Wild Bill and Johns in the mid-nineties before the role that defined everything after.

Dewey Riley works because Arquette plays competence and incompetence simultaneously. The deputy in Scream is brave and completely out of his depth at the same time, and the audience is invited to laugh at him and worry about him in the same shot, which is much harder than it looks and is the reason the character survived four sequels between 1996 and 2022. He is the emotional continuity of that franchise, the one who keeps showing up and keeps getting hurt.

Around it, he spent a decade in broad studio comedy, See Spot Run, Eight Legged Freaks, Muppets from Space, Never Been Kissed, Ready to Rumble, and a period as a professional wrestler, from which he has since retired. He also directed one film, the 2006 horror picture The Tripper.

The late career is the interesting part. Somewhere in the last ten years he became a genuinely good character actor for low-budget horror and crime: Purvis in Bone Tomahawk, the Creepshow series, Spree, 12 Hour Shift, a small-town police chief in The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a turn on Mrs. Davis. The credits got smaller and the performances got better, which is a rarer trajectory than the reverse.