Reed Diamond

Reed Edward Diamond was born in New York City in 1967 and started in film, with Virgil Hoogesteger in Memphis Belle (1990) and supporting parts in Clear and Present Danger and Assassins. The career that stuck, though, is a television career, and it began properly with Det. Mike Kellerman on Homicide: Life on the Street, which is still the deepest thing he has been given. Kellerman arrives as a golden boy and comes apart slowly over several seasons, and Diamond plays the erosion patiently rather than in one big scene.

What he does better than almost anyone in his bracket is institutional authority with a hairline crack in it. He is cast as the man in the suit whose loyalties the audience is meant to keep re-checking, and he is disciplined enough never to tip his hand early. Laurence Dominic on Dollhouse, Jason Pillar in the eighth season of 24, Ray Haffner on The Mentalist, the FBI director on Designated Survivor and Daniel Whitehall on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. all draw on the same instrument, tuned differently.

The film work has become a sideline but a decent one: Mark Shapiro in Moneyball, John Aaron in Good Night, and Good Luck., Much Ado About Nothing, and more recently Richard in Drop. Add Colonel Stallings in The Terror, Harold Balinger in Wayward Pines, Albert Stanton in The Purge, plus The Shield, Journeyman, Bones, Franklin & Bash and Underground, and you have forty-odd credits belonging to an actor who has never had a signature hit and has never been out of work either.