Ed Helms

Helms spent four years as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which is a specific kind of training: you learn to keep a straight face while saying something absurd, and you learn to interview real people without breaking. Both skills went straight into Andy Bernard on The Office, a salesman whose relentless positivity sits much closer to panic than to charm.

What he is good at is composure under humiliation. The comedy is not in the collapse, it is in how long he keeps trying to hold the room together while the collapse happens around him. Stu Price in The Hangover is a dentist insisting he is still in control as the evidence piles up, and the trilogy essentially reruns that structure twice more with diminishing returns. Vacation, We're the Millers and Tag put him in the same lane, professionally and profitably.

The more interesting work is smaller. Cedar Rapids gives him a naive insurance salesman with real pathos underneath the sweetness. Chappaquiddick is a straight dramatic role of a kind most comic leads never get offered. Together Together is quiet and adult and almost nobody saw it. He voices the Once-ler in The Lorax and Mr. Krupp in Captain Underpants, and he co-wrote and starred in the comedy series Rutherford Falls.

He is a considerably better actor than the Hangover sequels required, which is meant as a compliment and a complaint at the same time.