Stephen Root

Stephen Root is the character actor other character actors watch. Attention first came from Jimmy James on NewsRadio (1995 to 1999), Milton Waddams in Office Space (1999), and Bill Dauterive and Buck Strickland on King of the Hill. Nobody has ever gone to a film because he was in it, and a startling number of good films have him somewhere in the second half of the cast list.

His register is men who are slightly out of sync with the room and entirely certain that they are not. Milton is the purest distillation: a mumbled, unbroken grievance about a stapler, delivered by a man nobody has listened to in years, and Root plays it with total conviction rather than for laughs, which is why it is funny and also why it is bleak. He can flip that same quality to menace with almost no visible adjustment, which is what Get Out uses. Jim Hudson is mild, blind and reasonable, and the mildness is the horror.

He has turned up in five Coen films, from O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Ladykillers through No Country for Old Men and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to The Tragedy of Macbeth, which is as good an endorsement as the supporting-actor profession offers. Barry finally handed him a lead-sized part in Monroe Fuches, a man who is pathetic and lethal in alternating scenes. Alongside all of it runs a steady voice career: Bubbles in the Finding Nemo films, Bud Gleeful in Gravity Falls, three characters in Rango.