Tim Guinee
Tim Guinee is an actor, born 1962.
Guinee is a stage actor who has spent thirty years being extremely recognisable and almost never identified. He came up through theatre, has worked steadily in film and television since the early 1990s, and has never had the one role that turns a face into a name. That is a specific sort of career and a hard one to sustain.
The parts tell you what he is for. He is Major Allen in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, the Air Force officer trying to assert jurisdiction over a man in a metal suit. He is Curtis Webb in Blade, a fire officer in Ladder 49, Tomin across Stargate SG-1, and the railroad financier Collis Huntington through five seasons of Hell on Wheels. Casting directors reach for him when a scene needs somebody who is obviously competent and just as obviously outranked by the plot.
The better work is smaller and quieter. 99 Homes, Promised Land, Ben Is Back and Harriet each give him a few minutes of ordinary decency under pressure, and he never oversells a second of it. That restraint is probably why the name has not stuck. It is also why he is still working.
Movies (36)
- Iron Man 2 (2010)
- Iron Man (2008)
- Blade (1998)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)
- Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008)
- Vampires (1998)
- Synecdoche, New York (2008)
- Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2 (2024)
- Harriet (2019)
- Ladder 49 (2004)
- Courage Under Fire (1996)
- Heaven & Earth (1993)
- The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012)
- 99 Homes (2015)
- Impostor (2001)
- Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
- Tai-Pan (1986)
- Water for Elephants (2011)
- Ben Is Back (2018)
- Promised Land (2012)
- How to Make an American Quilt (1995)
- Cyrus (2010)
- Men of War (1994)
- The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
- The Oranges (2011)
- Vinegar Hill (2005)
- Sweet Land (2005)
- Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis (1991)
- Personal Velocity (2002)
- Brave New World (1998)
TV (20)
- Elementary (2012)
- Ghost Whisperer (2005)
- Lie to Me (2009)
- Hell on Wheels (2011)
- Van Helsing (2016)
- Wiseguy (1987)
- The Staircase (2022)
- The Beast in Me (2025)
- Revolution (2012)
- NOS4A2 (2019)
- Three Rivers (2009)
- Inventing Anna (2022)
- The Lost Room (2006)
- Tarzan (2003)
- In Justice (2006)
- Miami Medical (2010)
- The Deep End (2010)
- Golden Years (1991)
- Level 9 (2000)
- Killer Instinct (2005)
Where to start with Tim Guinee
If you see him in one thing, make it 99 Homes. It is the best film he is in, and his part in it, an ordinary man on the wrong side of a foreclosure, is exactly the register he is quietly excellent in.
Iron Man is where most people have seen him without registering it, and it is a useful demonstration of how much a two-scene official can add to a blockbuster. Hell on Wheels is the longest and most substantial role he has had. Ben Is Back and Harriet are both small, well-judged supporting turns in serious films. For the strange one, Synecdoche, New York casts him as an actor playing an actor, which is a joke worth the detour.
The serious films
Where the actual acting is, and none of it is where the audience is. Synecdoche is the best-made film on the list, and Sweet Land and 99 Homes are the small American dramas he keeps quietly turning up in.
The blockbusters
The studio credits, which are the widest-reach and the least demanding. Two Iron Man films give him an Air Force major with about four lines, and the rest are supporting parts in other people's spectacle.
The television
Hell on Wheels is the long one, five seasons as a railroad magnate. The Lost Room is the cult miniseries people still recommend, and the rest is steady guest work across two decades of American television.