Paul Schneider

Schneider wrote his own way in. All the Real Girls (2003), which he co-wrote with David Gordon Green and starred in, introduced him and brought a Gotham Independent Film Award nomination for Breakthrough Performer, and it set the register he has worked in ever since: naturalistic, hesitant, a little sour under the charm.

He is best at playing men who are worse than they believe themselves to be. Dick Liddil in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is the clearest case, a talkative hanger-on in a film full of people performing their own legends, and Schneider makes him vain and small without making him ridiculous. Gus in Lars and the Real Girl (2007) is the same instrument tuned to decency: a brother trying to do the right thing and visibly hating every minute of it.

Television has been the less happy half. He played Mark Brendanawicz through the first two seasons of Parks and Recreation in 2009 and 2010, then left, and the show found its feet almost immediately afterwards; the part was a straight man in a comedy that had not yet worked out it needed none. Since then he has taken supporting roles in ambitious films, among them Bright Star (2009), Away We Go (2009), The Flowers of War (2011), Water for Elephants (2011), Cafe Society (2016) and Rules Don't Apply (2016), plus genre television in NOS4A2, Channel Zero and Tales from the Loop, and a part in Train Dreams (2025). It is a career of good choices that never quite assembled into a run.