Tom Everett Scott

Thomas Everett Scott got the kind of break most actors only read about. Born in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1970, he landed the lead in That Thing You Do! (1996) as Guy Patterson, the drummer whose improvised tempo turns a local band into a one-hit wonder. He was perfectly cast, and the reason is the thing that has quietly shaped everything since. He has the face and the easy baritone of a 1950s studio contract player, so a film set in 1964 fits him like it was tailored.

The immediate follow-up was a lead in An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), which did not launch what it was meant to launch, and after that the leading-man track quietly closed. What replaced it is more interesting than the usual decline narrative: he became a genuinely busy character actor with over forty credits, and he is good at a specific thing, playing men who are decent, competent and slightly out of their depth without ever asking the audience to pity them. Boiler Room (2000) uses that well, as does One True Thing.

Television has taken most of the last twenty years. Detective Russell Clarke on Southland, Charles Garnett on Z Nation, Kevin Duval on Scream: The TV Series, Adam Fisher on The Summer I Turned Pretty, plus the sitcom I'm Sorry. On film he now works mostly as somebody's father or somebody's boss: Frank Heffley in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, David in La La Land, Race to Witch Mountain, Parental Guidance, Because I Said So, and Clouds (2020). It is a career that stopped being a headline a long time ago and has been in constant employment ever since, which is the better outcome of the two.