Eugene Cordero
Eugene Cordero is an actor, born 1978.
Eugene Cordero came out of the Los Angeles comedy scene and turned into one of television's most reliable series regulars without ever having to carry a show alone. Born in Detroit in 1978, he built the resume in half-hours: Other Space in 2015, the real-estate parody Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, Tacoma FD from 2019 to 2021, and recurring runs on House of Lies, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Wrecked and The Good Place.
What he does is refuse to be impressed. Cordero's characters treat extraordinary circumstances as ordinary admin, and the comedy comes from the gap. Casey in Loki is the clerk at an agency that polices time, meeting a god's threats with procedure. Pillboi in The Good Place responds to the moral architecture of the universe roughly the way he responds to everything else. Sam Rutherford in Star Trek: Lower Decks, played from 2020 to 2024, is the exception: an engineer with an implant in his head and no cynicism at all, which turns out to be the harder thing to voice.
Film has used him in single scenes, in Kong: Skull Island, The Mule, Ghostbusters, The High Note and The Kings of Summer, and in a larger part in Easter Sunday.
The animation work has quietly become half the job. He is in Steven Universe, Close Enough, Central Park, Little Demon, Kiff and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, and on the live-action side A Man on the Inside arrived in 2024.
Movies (13)
- Kong: Skull Island (2017)
- Ghostbusters (2016)
- The Mule (2018)
- Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)
- When in Rome (2010)
- The High Note (2020)
- The Kings of Summer (2013)
- Furry Vengeance (2010)
- Influenced (2026)
- The Paloni Show! Halloween Special! (2022)
- Afternoon Delight (2013)
- Easter Sunday (2022)
- Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making of Loki Season 2 (2023)
TV (24)
- Loki (2021)
- Steven Universe (2013)
- Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020)
- The Good Place (2016)
- Jurassic World: Chaos Theory (2024)
- Rock, Paper, Scissors (2024)
- Tacoma FD (2019)
- Close Enough (2020)
- Kiff (2023)
- Black Monday (2019)
- A Man on the Inside (2024)
- Central Park (2020)
- Wrecked (2016)
- Dream Corp LLC (2016)
- Kevin (2026)
- Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ (2016)
- Very Important People (2023)
- Everybody Still Hates Chris (2024)
- Carol's Second Act (2019)
- Weird City (2019)
- Helpsters (2019)
- Star Trek Day (2020)
- I'm Sorry (2017)
- Little Demon (2022)
Where to start with Eugene Cordero
Star Trek: Lower Decks makes the best case for him: years of an engineer who is sincerely delighted by his own job, and sincerity is much harder to play for laughs than sarcasm. Start there.
Loki is the famous one and the shortest route in, with Casey treating a Norse god as a filing problem. The Good Place gives you Pillboi, who exists mainly to remind you what Jason was doing before any of this happened. Then Tacoma FD for the sustained comic work and A Man on the Inside for the recent, gentler version of it.
If you only want the film side, The Kings of Summer is the good one, and Kong: Skull Island puts him in a monster picture doing exactly what is required.
Star Trek and the animation
Rutherford in Lower Decks is the lead voice role, and the show is an affectionate parody that ended up being one of the better Star Trek series outright. The rest is steady animation work across four networks.
The comedy series
A decade of recurring roles in half-hour comedies. The Good Place is the best show on the list and he turns up as one of its more unsettling background figures. Tacoma FD is the longest run of them.
The films
Mostly small comic parts in studio pictures. The Kings of Summer is the outlier and the one worth seeking out, a genuinely good coming-of-age film that almost nobody saw at the time.