Muse Watson

Watson's screen career starts late and starts already weathered. The earliest credits here are from the end of the 1980s, and he has spent all of it playing men with a history the script does not spell out.

Horror gave him his signature. He is Ben Willis in I Know What You Did Last Summer, the fisherman in the slicker, a part that requires almost no dialogue and runs entirely on silhouette and pace, and he came back for I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. It is a slasher role, and the reason it stuck is that Watson plays it as a man doing unpleasant work rather than a monster enjoying himself. That restraint is worth more in the genre than any amount of snarling.

Television has used him better. Mike Franks on NCIS is his best-known part, a recurring role the series kept returning to across years, and Charles Westmoreland on Prison Break is the character the show ties to the D. B. Cooper hijacking, which is the most-discussed piece of backstory in it. Between and around those he has done Westerns, cop parts and drifters: Sommersby, Rosewood, Assassins, American Outlaws, Frankenfish, End of the Spear, Dead Birds. The face does most of the work in all of them, weathered and unhurried and slightly sad, and he has never seemed interested in disguising it.