Utkarsh Ambudkar

Utkarsh Ambudkar has a second name, UTK the INC, and a rap career under it, and the screen career grew up around that skill rather than beside it. He is Donald in Pitch Perfect in 2012, Rishi on The Mindy Project, Amir in Ride Along 2, and Rin in Blindspotting, a film that hands its most charged scenes over to spoken verse.

What he is good at is speed without smugness. Most fast-talking supporting characters are written to win the scene. Ambudkar plays men who are talking because stopping would be worse, which is a different and more sympathetic thing: Manish on Never Have I Ever, Max Vora in The Broken Hearts Gallery and Jern in Brittany Runs a Marathon are all built on that.

Ghosts, from 2021, is the first thing to make him a lead. He plays Jay Arondekar, the half of a couple who cannot see what his wife can, which is a straight-man job and much harder than it looks. Around it sit Rakesh Dewan in The Dropout, King Bumi in the 2024 Avatar: The Last Airbender, Mouser in Free Guy, Todd in tick, tick... BOOM!, Suresh in World's Best, and a steady run of voice work across Mira, Royal Detective, Marvel's Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, SuperKitties and The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild.

He also plays Bor'Dor Dog'Son on Critical Role, which is an unusual credit for a network sitcom lead and a decent indicator of what he actually finds interesting.