Dean Haglund
Dean Haglund is an actor, born 1965.
Haglund is an improviser first. He came up through the Vancouver TheatreSports League, which is not the usual route into a genre-television institution, and it shows in the performance: Richard Ringo Langly, the blond, belligerent one of the Lone Gunmen, plays looser and twitchier than almost anything else in The X-Files.
The Lone Gunmen were built as a one-off gag, three conspiracy hobbyists publishing a paranoid newsletter out of a back room, and they became the thing audiences kept asking for. Haglund carried Langly across the run of the series, into the 1998 feature film, and then into the spin-off The Lone Gunmen, which got thirteen episodes in 2001 and no more. That show is better than its fate suggests: a comedy about incompetent investigators, made by a drama team who could not quite let go of the plotting.
Outside that, the credit list is short. He voiced Sid in an animated Tom Sawyer in 2000 and worked on The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. He also invented and sold the Chill Pak, a cooling pad for laptop computers, which is the single most Langly thing any actor has ever done away from the camera. Born in 1965, he has kept the stand-up and improv career running alongside the conventions.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Dean Haglund
The obvious answer is The X-Files, but the useful version of it is narrower: watch the Lone Gunmen episodes. They are the show's release valve, and Langly is the one who gets to be openly rude to Mulder, which the format badly needs.
The Lone Gunmen is the real recommendation and the underseen one. Thirteen episodes of a caper comedy wearing a conspiracy-thriller coat, cancelled far too fast, and the only place Haglund gets to be a lead. The X-Files is worth it for how the trio translate to a cinema budget. Tom Sawyer and The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot are the voice work, and both are for completists rather than newcomers.