Reed Birney

Reed Birney is, first and by a wide margin, a theatre actor. Born in Alexandria, Virginia in 1954, he has worked on and off Broadway for decades, and the recognition arrived late in that run: a Tony nomination in 2014 for Casa Valentina and the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2016 for The Humans. Screen work has largely been the thing he does between plays, which is why his filmography looks less like a climb and more like a steady accumulation.

He has a very particular screen use. Directors cast him as the polite, unremarkable man in the room, and then use that politeness as either reassurance or threat depending on how the scene is cut. He is extremely still, he almost never pushes, and he can hold a close-up while saying nothing at all. Donald Blythe on House of Cards is the decent version, a man too mild for the room he is in. Tom Connolly on The Blacklist is the other one, all courtesy over cold calculation. Peter Hackett in Lost Girls sits somewhere unpleasant between the two.

The best of it is recent, and there is a small joke buried in the credits: he plays a Richard twice, in Mass (2021) and in The Menu (2022). They are opposite jobs. Mass is a single long conversation between two sets of parents, and Birney does most of his work listening, absorbing, and failing to find anything adequate to say. The Menu asks him to be a wealthy regular customer who has stopped tasting anything, which he plays with a bland complacency that is very funny and then not funny at all. Around them sit Changeling, The Hunt, Titans, Silo and Home Before Dark, a run of solid, unshowy television.