Steven Williams

Steven Williams has been working since the mid seventies, when he turned up in Cooley High, and he has spent five decades as one of American television's most dependable authority figures. Captain Adam Fuller on 21 Jump Street carried him through the late eighties, Lieutenant Jefferson Burnett on the original Equalizer overlapped with it, and he has a Screen Actors Guild nomination and an NAACP Image Award nomination for the range of it.

The role that made him a cult figure is Mr. X on The X-Files. He appeared across several seasons as an informant who met Mulder in car parks and stairwells, and Williams played him as a man who resented every second of the arrangement. The trick is in the delivery: he can hand over a piece of plot information in a tone that makes it sound like a warning about the listener's own future, which is how a character who only ever explained things became one of the most quoted in the show.

Genre work has kept him busy since. He was the bounty hunter Creighton Duke in Jason Goes to Hell, Rufus Turner across Supernatural, where a crotchety veteran monster hunter gave him more comedy than he usually gets, Virgil in The Leftovers, Joe Ridgeway in Locke & Key and Leroy Hanlon in the 2017 adaptation of It. He also appears very briefly in The Blues Brothers as a state trooper, which is where a surprising number of people first saw him without knowing it.