Jason London

Peaking early is a difficult thing to survive. London was Reese Witherspoon's love interest, Court Foster, in The Man in the Moon in 1991, and two years later he was Randall 'Pink' Floyd in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, the quarterback with a pledge to sign and one long night to get through. Pink works because London does almost nothing with him: he listens, he stalls, he lets everybody else be the funny one, and the film's whole drift depends on that stillness at the middle of it.

That unforced naturalism was the gift and also the ceiling. He is a leading man who does not push, which is a real skill and a narrow market, and the 1990s used it well enough. Bobby Ray in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, Gideon in Safe Passage, Tim in Fall Time, Kevin Donnelly in If These Walls Could Talk, Jesse Ryan in The Rage: Carrie 2, the title role in a television Jason and the Argonauts.

After 2000 the work moved to the direct-to-video shelf and largely stayed there, which the credit list documents without mercy. Rick Rambis in the snowboarding comedy Out Cold and Jimmy Wilson in the skateboarding one Grind are the last of the studio releases. Then come both Dracula sequels, Ascension and Legacy, both Prophecy sequels, and a long run of creature features: Snow Beast, Zombie Shark, Mississippi River Sharks, in which he is credited as Jason London. He is the twin brother of the actor Jeremy London, and he is still working, with Joe Baby and Neglected among the recent credits.