Ray McKinnon
Ray McKinnon is an actor, born 1957.
Ray McKinnon is from Adel, Georgia, and has four jobs: actor, screenwriter, director and producer. The acting started in 1989 with a state trooper in Driving Miss Daisy and settled into a long run of small Southern parts, Bradley in A Perfect World, Deputy Norris Ridgewick in Needful Things, Charlie Campion in The Stand, Jerry Bostick at a mission control console in Apollo 13, and Vernon T. Waldrip in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is the one people quote.
The voice is the asset. Reedy, nasal, unmistakably Georgian, and he can point it in either direction. Waldrip is comic pomposity, a small man inflated by a suit. Linc Potter in Mayans M.C. is a federal prosecutor whose exaggerated courtesy is entirely a weapon. Kyle in Take Shelter and Senior in Mud are the plain version, decent men in the background of somebody else's crisis, and McKinnon is unshowy enough that you believe them immediately.
The other career is the more distinguished one. He won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for The Accountant in 2001, and he created Rectify, which is as patient and unsentimental as American television has ever managed to be about the South. Nothing in his acting work is as good as what he wrote, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about a jobbing character actor with well over forty credits.
Movies (35)
- Ford v Ferrari (2019)
- Apollo 13 (1995)
- The Blind Side (2009)
- Mud (2013)
- Chaos Walking (2021)
- O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
- Violent Ends (2025)
- The Net (1995)
- Footloose (2011)
- A Perfect World (1993)
- Sommersby (1993)
- The Missing (2003)
- Take Shelter (2011)
- Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
- News of the World (2020)
- Needful Things (1993)
- Bugsy (1991)
- Knox Goes Away (2024)
- Dolphin Tale (2011)
- Goodbye Lover (1999)
- The Dead Don't Hurt (2024)
- The Badge (2002)
- Hick (2012)
- Rising Son (1990)
- Roswell (1994)
- The Grass Harp (1996)
- Paris Trout (1991)
- The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991)
- Randy & the Mob (2007)
- Randy & the Mob (2007)
TV (11)
Where to start with Ray McKinnon
Begin with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, where Vernon T. Waldrip is four scenes of pure ridiculous dignity and the fastest possible demonstration of what that voice can do.
Then watch Rectify, which he created and which is the reason his name is worth knowing. It moves slowly on purpose, it refuses almost every satisfaction a prison drama normally offers, and it is one of the best written American series of its decade. That recommendation is not a close call.
For the acting, Take Shelter and Mud are the two best supporting turns, both quiet, both in films worth your time anyway. Mayans M.C. is where he gets to be openly strange, a prosecutor performing folksiness at people who know better. Apollo 13 and Needful Things are the early bit parts if you want to see the type forming. News of the World is the best of the recent ones.