Neil deGrasse Tyson

An astrophysicist with a Sharknado credit has made some specific choices. Neil deGrasse Tyson, born in Manhattan in 1958, studied at Harvard, the University of Texas at Austin and Columbia, spent 1991 to 1994 as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton, and joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist in 1994. He became its director in 1996 and oversaw a $210 million reconstruction completed in 2000, and he has held that post since.

The public career grew out of the institution. He wrote Origins in 2004, Space Chronicles in 2012 and StarTalk in 2016, and hosted Cosmos in 2014, a sequel to Carl Sagan's series and the highest-profile item on this page. What he is genuinely good at is the reframe: taking a fact the audience already holds and rotating it until it becomes strange again.

What the credit list actually documents, though, is a scientist who says yes to nearly everything. He is Neil deBuck Weasel in Ice Age: Collision Course, the narrator of Scrat: Spaced Out, the voice of a coffee maker on Bill Nye Saves the World, himself in Zoolander 2, and Merlin in The Last Sharknado. Add the talk-show circuit, MythBusters, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, The Late Show, and the strategy is plain enough: he never wanted to be an authority kept behind glass. Whether the trade has cost him precision is a fair argument, and one better had with the books than with the cameos.