Raymond Lee
Raymond Lee is an actor, born 1987.
For most of the 2010s Lee was the actor you recognised without being able to place. Arlen in Mozart in the Jungle, Duc in HBO's Here and Now, a pet store clerk on Trophy Wife, Jin on Prodigal Son: parts that ask for a real person for two scenes and then let the show move on.
The useful thing about that kind of career is what it teaches. He can hold a scene at a low volume, which is why Driveways works. It is a small, quiet film and he plays it without a single push for sympathy. Kevin Can F**k Himself put him inside a formal experiment, a series that switches between sitcom lighting and grim single-camera drama, and he had to be legible in both.
Quantum Leap changed the scale. Playing Dr. Ben Song from 2022 to 2024 put him at the front of a network science fiction show, which is a different job entirely: carrying exposition, a new setting every week, and an audience that arrived with strong feelings about the original. Around it he has taken the studio work that leads bring, a fighter pilot in Top Gun: Maverick and a police officer in The Lost City, and returned to prestige television with Sugar. The range is proven; what he has not yet had is the great part.
Movies (3)
TV (9)
Where to start with Raymond Lee
Skip the big titles and start small. Driveways is the best thing here by a distance, an unhurried film about a boy, his mother and an old neighbour, and Lee's work in it is the sort that only looks easy.
Then go to Quantum Leap for the version of him built to carry a whole show. It is comfort-food network science fiction and he is the reason it holds together week to week. Kevin Can F**K Himself is the most interesting series on his list, a genuinely strange formal idea about who sitcoms are cruel to, and he moves between its two worlds cleanly. Mozart in the Jungle and Here and Now are the early prestige-television years. Top Gun: Maverick is the biggest thing he has been in and the least revealing.