David Krumholtz

A Queens kid who was working professionally before he could drive, Krumholtz made his Broadway debut at fourteen in Conversations with My Father (1992) and was on screen the next year as the anxious camp outsider in Addams Family Values. The Santa Clause handed him Bernard, a head elf with the manner of a put-upon middle manager, and he has been playing variations on that impatience ever since.

The specific thing he does is talk. Krumholtz is one of the few actors who can deliver a paragraph of technical explanation and make it sound like an argument he is losing. A whole CBS drama ran on that for six seasons, and so does his Isidor Rabi in Oppenheimer, who spends the film telling a genius things the genius does not want to hear. Comedy uses the same engine at higher speed: Michael Eckman narrates his own high school in 10 Things I Hate About You like a war correspondent, and Goldstein in Harold and Kumar is pure aggrieved logic.

Directors with a taste for period texture keep finding him. The Coens used him twice, as a blacklist-era communist writer in Hail, Caesar! and in a segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Ang Lee put him in The Ice Storm, Taylor Hackford in Ray, Woody Allen in Wonder Wheel, Christopher Nolan in Oppenheimer.

The stage never left either. He returned to Broadway in 2022 as Hermann Merz in Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt and picked up a Drama League nomination, and the screen work has skewed heavier since, through The Deuce and The Plot Against America. It is a good late chapter for someone who spent twenty years cast as the funny friend.