Michael Trucco
Michael Trucco is an actor, born 1970.
Trucco spent the late 1990s in the pilot mines, on shows like Pensacola: Wings of Gold and in films nobody remembers, before Battlestar Galactica handed him Samuel Anders: a professional athlete who ends up leading a resistance cell, introduced well into the run and then written steadily deeper into the show. It is still the role his name attaches to.
The quality he has is specific and commercially useful. He reads instantly as a decent, slightly worn American man, and television uses that in two opposite directions. In one, he is the reliable one: Nick Podarutti on How I Met Your Mother, Tom Demming on Castle, Luke Leone on Fire Country, an assistant district attorney on The Rookie. In the other, the decency is a paint job over something worse, and this is where he is far more interesting.
Mike Flanagan has now used him three times, in Hush, Midnight Mass and The Fall of the House of Usher, and those are the best roles on his record. Rufus Griswold in particular is a monstrous man played entirely without vanity, and Wade Scarborough is a small-town mayor whose reasonableness curdles by degrees. Elsewhere: Nate Ryan on Revenge, Benjamin Cash on Citadel, and Tae Kwon Doug on Disjointed, the aggressively anti-drug martial arts instructor, which is the funniest thing he has done. Recent films include The Electric State and The Life of Chuck.
Movies (11)
TV (15)
- The Rookie (2018)
- Castle (2009)
- How I Met Your Mother (2005)
- Battlestar Galactica (2004)
- Citadel (2023)
- Revenge (2011)
- Fire Country (2022)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
- Midnight Mass (2021)
- Big Shot (2021)
- Fairly Legal (2011)
- Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997)
- Intelligence (2014)
- Dream Corp LLC (2016)
- Disjointed (2017)
Where to start with Michael Trucco
Battlestar Galactica if you have four seasons to give it, because Anders is the part that rewards the investment and the show is one of the best science fiction dramas ever made for television. If you do not, start smaller.
The Fall of the House of Usher is the fastest route to his best work: eight episodes, and Griswold is repellent in a way that takes real nerve to play. Midnight Mass is the more restrained Flanagan role and the better series. Hush is a lean single-location thriller and shows what he can do with almost no dialogue. On the lighter side, How I Met Your Mother and Castle are where most people have actually seen him, playing the good guy who is doomed to be the one the lead has to get past, and Fire Country is the current network version of the same.
Battlestar Galactica and the genre work
Samuel Anders was written for a single episode and became a series regular through one of the most argued-about turns that show ever took. The two television films continue the story, and the later genre credits trade on the same steadiness.
The Mike Flanagan horror
A recurring member of Flanagan's company, and the roles keep getting worse people to play. Rufus Griswold in The Fall of the House of Usher is genuinely repellent and he clearly enjoys it.
The network dramas
Two decades of American television as the handsome man with a complication somewhere behind him. How I Met Your Mother is the comic register, Revenge is the soapiest, and Fire Country is the steady recent work.