David Norona
David Norona is an actor, born 1974.
David Norona, also credited as David Norona with the tilde, is a Cuban American actor whose career reads as a fairly precise map of American network television across three decades. The parts are institutional. A nurse in Popular, an assistant district attorney in The Defenders, Senator Matthew Montez in The Gifted, Leon Montero in the political drama Mister Sterling, Jose Marzan in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. Casting directors reached for him when a scene needed somebody credible in a suit who could carry procedure without sounding bored by it.
The best of the work is the guest work. Gary Deitman in Six Feet Under sits inside a series that made a habit of giving one-off characters more interior life than most shows grant their leads. And there is a strange, good run around 2001, when Six Feet Under, Popular and That's My Bush! all used him within a couple of years: a prestige drama, a high-school satire and a sitcom about a sitting president, all wanting the same actor.
Film has been rarer. He plays Bill Layton in I Can Only Imagine, and his other film work, including Though None Go with Me, is not among the credits listed here. Away from performing he writes and directs: he is co-creator and co-lyricist of the musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings and has directed two short films, which puts him among the many working actors whose most personal projects never appear on a filmography like this one.
Movies (1)
TV (11)
Where to start with David Norona
Six Feet Under is the shortest route to why he keeps working, so start there and watch how much a good actor can do with a single episode and a character nobody will mention again.
Then The Mentalist, which gave him one of his better-known names, and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the biggest-budget thing on the list and the most conventional use of him.
For the political register, The Gifted casts him as a senator and Mister Sterling puts him inside a Washington drama outright, which is where that particular authority reads best. That's My Bush! is the outlier and the most fun, a broad parody sitcom with nothing in common with the rest of his work. I Can Only Imagine is the film to try if you want to see him in something a lot of people actually watched.