Ennis Esmer
Ennis Esmer is an actor, born 1978.
The best single fact about this career is that Blindspot wrote Rich Dotcom specifically for him. That happens when a performer turns a functional guest part into something a writers' room wants more of, and it is a better credential than most awards.
He is Turkish-Canadian, born in Ankara, and the shape of the work is distinctly Canadian: long runs on domestic series that American viewers discover years later. Osman Bey in The Listener from 2009 to 2014, Nash in Red Oaks from 2014 to 2017, Kurtis Mazhari in Private Eyes from 2016 to 2021, all overlapping, all built on the same useful quality. He plays men who are too pleased with themselves to be threatening and too quick to be dismissed, and he can turn that into something sadder mid-sentence without signalling that he is about to.
The film work is more scattered and more interesting than the television suggests. Young People Fucking is the early Canadian comedy that got him noticed, Clara and I Used to Be Funny are dramas that use his lightness against the material, and Miss Sloane dropped him into an American political thriller. He is also a voice actor, a writer and a presenter, which explains why he is on a Canadian screen somewhere more or less continuously, and why he plays a character called Ennis in Children Ruin Everything.
Movies (12)
TV (14)
Where to start with Ennis Esmer
The obvious way in is Blindspot, since Rich Dotcom was written for him and he plays it like a man who knows it: the character exists to hijack whatever scene he is in, and the show is more fun whenever he is around.
Red Oaks is the better series overall, a warm 1980s country-club comedy with Nash as the resident operator. Private Eyes and The Listener are the long Canadian procedurals, easy company and completely undemanding, and either will happily absorb a wet afternoon. For the dramatic register, I Used to Be Funny is the strongest film here and Clara the most ambitious. Schitt's Creek is a guest appearance and nothing more, though plenty of people arrive here through it. Skip Decoys.