David Rasche

David Rasche came up in the theatre and got famous playing a lunatic. Sledge Hammer! cast him as a police detective who loved his revolver more than any person in his life, and the joke worked because Rasche played him with total sincerity, as though the character had never once suspected he was ridiculous.

That sincerity turned into the career. For forty years he has specialised in men with authority who are untroubled by doubt, and the comedy comes from how little turbulence ever reaches their faces. Linton Barwick in In the Loop is the sharpest version: a Washington official who handles an inconvenient fact by having the minutes rewritten, delivered as calmly as a lunch order. In Burn After Reading he is the CIA officer receiving increasingly deranged briefings and treating them as a scheduling problem. Karl Muller in Succession is the same man after thirty years of corporate survival, a senior executive whose superpower is that nothing has ever landed on him.

He is not only funny. United 93 asked him to play Donald Freeman Greene, a real passenger, with no distance and no performance, and he did it. Swallow uses him as a wealthy father-in-law whose politeness is the threat. The rest of the list is a working actor's list: a bit part in Manhattan in 1979, Cobra in 1986, Just Married, The Big Wedding, Ugly Betty, Veep, Theater Camp, and a steady flow of television into his eighties.