Richard Kind

Richard Kind is an actor, born 1956.

Richard Kind started in Chicago theatre and reached Broadway in 1984 in The Pirates of Penzance, which explains most of what followed: he is a stage comedian who happens to be very good on camera. Television made him familiar first, as Dr. Mark Devanow on Mad About You and then as the press secretary Paul Lassiter on Spin City from 1996 to 2002, a performance built almost entirely out of misplaced confidence.

The thing he has refined since is men who talk too much because silence would be unbearable. Uncle Arthur in the Coen brothers' A Serious Man is the purest version, a houseguest with nowhere else to go who knows it. Max Klein in Argo turns a few scenes of Hollywood bluster into the film's relief valve. Vince Fish in Only Murders in the Building and Cousin Andy in Curb Your Enthusiasm run on the same fuel, as does his Rudy Giuliani in Bombshell.

Pixar found the other setting. Bing Bong in Inside Out is a children's imaginary friend given the saddest job in the film, and Kind plays him with the vibrato of a man performing cheerfulness at himself. He has worked steadily around all of it: Louis in The Station Agent, Jacob in The Visitor, Walter Bloom in tick, tick... BOOM!, Dr. Cohen in Beau Is Afraid, plus a current run as announcer and sidekick on a Netflix live talk show. Few actors have been in this many good films while remaining, to most viewers, simply that guy.

Where to start with Richard Kind

A Serious Man first. It is the Coens at their most unforgiving, and Kind's freeloading uncle is the character the film keeps returning to whenever it needs a human being instead of a parable. Then Inside Out, where his imaginary friend does the heaviest emotional lifting in a Pixar film full of professional emotional lifters.

From there, The Station Agent shows what he can do with warmth and no jokes, and Argo shows the opposite, a burst of showbiz noise dropped into a tense thriller. Spin City is the sitcom to sample for the running-at-full-tilt version of the persona, Only Murders in the Building the recent role that best uses his ability to be funny and slightly pitiful at once, and tick, tick... BOOM! the quiet one, worth the detour.

The Pixar and animation work

Animation found him early and has never let go. Bing Bong in Inside Out is the performance that made a generation cry, and the earlier Pixar parts show why they kept calling: he can be funny and heartbroken in the same line.

Four decades of sitcoms

From Mad About You to Curb Your Enthusiasm and onward to the present day, playing the same fundamental man at different ages: too loud, too confident, and a great deal more fragile than the room around him ever understands. Red Oaks is the underrated one.

The dramatic supporting turns

Directors who know his comic register keep using it for dread instead. The Coen brothers, Tom McCarthy and Ari Aster all cast him as a man whose cheerfulness is doing a great deal of work it cannot sustain.

The cult and oddity credits

Clifford alone justifies this list, a film so strange it took twenty years to find its audience. The rest is a working actor's back catalogue, sharks and sequels included, and he is committed in every one of them.

Genres Richard Kind works in

More about Richard Kind

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