Kevin O'Leary
Kevin O'Leary is an actor, born 1954.
Kevin O'Leary is a businessman who worked out that television needed a villain and volunteered. He built the persona on Canadian business programming through the 2000s, on The Lang and O'Leary Exchange and on Dragons' Den, then exported it to Shark Tank in 2009, where he has been ever since, self-styled as Mr. Wonderful.
The persona is the product and it is well made. A pitch format needs at least one panellist who will say no with pleasure, otherwise every segment ends in a deal and nothing is at stake. O'Leary took that job and sharpened it into a bit: the offer designed to insult, the royalty structure nobody would sign, the flat statement that an idea is dead on the table. Whether he is a good investor is a separate argument for a different kind of page. He is a genuinely good television performer, which is rarer among finance people than the number of them on camera suggests.
The odd late turn is acting. He hosted Discovery's Project Earth in 2008 and has done panel television since, but Milton Rockwell in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme is his first scripted feature role, a named character rather than himself, which nothing else in his screen career has ever asked of him.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Kevin O'Leary
There is no reason to be clever about Shark Tank: pick any season, watch him refuse three pitches, and you have the whole act. Dragons' Den, the Canadian original, is the same format with less gloss and a slightly meaner edge, and it is the more interesting one if you want to see the persona being assembled rather than performed.
Marty Supreme is the entry that matters now, because it asks him to be somebody else, which twenty years of reality television never has. Gutfeld! is panel television and you will know inside a minute whether it is for you. The Breadwinner has him appearing as himself again, the default setting. For the business-news version of the man rather than the reality-show version, the Canadian programmes named in his biography are the place, though they are not among the credits listed here.