Finn Wittrock

Finn Wittrock grew up around theatre and took the long route in: Juilliard, then three years on the soap opera All My Children, then Broadway in 2012 as Happy Loman in a revival of Death of a Salesman, which is the point at which people started paying attention. He had already worked with Tony Kushner off Broadway the year before.

Wittrock plays handsome men with something wrong underneath, and he is unusually willing to let the wrongness be ridiculous rather than cool. Dandy Mott in American Horror Story is the clearest case, a spoiled man-child in a sailor suit whose tantrums are funny right up until they are not, and the performance is enormous in a way most actors would be too vain to attempt. Ratched later worked the same register more quietly.

The film work runs the other way: small, precise, and often inside very good films. He is one of the two young investors in The Big Short, playing greed as naivety; the amiable boyfriend in La La Land; one of the men on the raft in Unbroken; Judy Garland's last husband in Judy; the lawyer in If Beale Street Could Talk. None of them are leads, and Ryan Murphy's television has served him better than anyone's features have.

The recent run is thrillers and streaming pictures: Deep Water, Luckiest Girl Alive, Don't Move. He remains an actor whose best screen work sits inside other people's ensembles, and the stage is still where he is given the most room.