Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman, born in Joliet, Illinois in 1970, is an actor, comedian, writer and working carpenter, and the carpentry is not a hobby footnote so much as a clue to the acting. He became famous as Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation from 2009 to 2015, winning the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Comedy and picking up two Critics' Choice nominations, and the character is now a permanent fixture of internet shorthand.

His comic engine is refusal. Offerman almost never raises his voice, almost never moves faster than he needs to, and gets laughs out of the gap between an absurd situation and a man declining to be moved by it. That stillness is a rarer skill than it looks, because it requires the rest of the scene to be funny at him rather than with him. It also means he ages well into drama, where the same withheld quality reads as competence, grief or menace depending on the director.

The interesting stretch of his career is the run where filmmakers use the moustache against type. Devs casts him as a tech billionaire whose serenity is a symptom of something much worse. The Founder makes him the McDonald brother with principles, watching his life get bought out from under him. Civil War gives him a president in a handful of shots and lets the stillness do the work. He also has a substantial voice career, Metal Beard in The Lego Movie, Gravity Falls, the Sing films, and a sideline in small independent dramas like Hearts Beat Loud and The Kings of Summer where he is allowed to be gentle.