Matt Ross
Matt Ross is an actor, born 1970.
Matt Ross has had two careers running at once since the nineties, and the acting one came first. Born in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1970, he worked steadily through the decade in parts that required precision rather than presence: Raji in PCU, Bee in Twelve Monkeys, Loomis in Face/Off, Dan in The Last Days of Disco, Ron Hewitt in Pushing Tin.
He is unusually good at humiliation. His best characters are men who have been embarrassed and have decided to continue anyway. Luis Carruthers in American Psycho is the purest case, a colleague whose devotion is treated as the joke and who never notices. Alby Grant on Big Love turns the same quality vicious. Gavin Belson on Silicon Valley is the definitive one, a technology chief executive who has learned to describe ordinary greed in spiritual language and believes every word while saying it.
The other career is directing. He wrote and directed Captain Fantastic in 2016, after 28 Hotel Rooms in 2012, and the shift explains something about the acting: both films are interested in people whose principles are inconvenient to everyone around them, which is not far from the parts he keeps being cast in.
He has kept the day job going throughout, with Glenn Odekirk in The Aviator, Eddie Scott in Good Night, and Good Luck., and television in Revolution, Magic City and Invasion.
Movies (17)
- American Psycho (2000)
- Face/Off (1997)
- Twelve Monkeys (1995)
- The Aviator (2004)
- Captain Fantastic (2016)
- Last Holiday (2006)
- Down with Love (2003)
- Pushing Tin (1999)
- Just Visiting (2001)
- Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005)
- PCU (1994)
- Homegrown (1998)
- The Last Days of Disco (1998)
- Company Man (2000)
- 28 Hotel Rooms (2012)
- Dust (2001)
- A Deadly Vision (1997)
TV (6)
Where to start with Matt Ross
Gavin Belson earns the top of the list, so begin at Silicon Valley: years of a man mistaking his own appetite for a philosophy, and Ross keeps him human enough to be funny rather than a cartoon. Then American Psycho for the opposite pole, a small part built entirely out of being overlooked.
Captain Fantastic is the one to see if you want the director rather than the actor, and it is worth the switch, a film about a father whose convictions cost his children something. Big Love holds the nastiest performance he has given.
For the early stuff, The Last Days of Disco and The Aviator show a young character actor already choosing the odd line reading over the obvious one.