Zach Gilford
Zach Gilford is an actor, born 1982.
Nobody casts Zach Gilford as the confident one. Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1982, he first mattered as Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights, the backup quarterback handed a job he never asked for in a town that cared about it far too much. It remains the best thing he has done, and it established what he is for: a face that shows doubt before the character has admitted to any.
That quality made him an awkward fit for conventional leading roles and an extremely good fit for horror, which needs someone the audience will worry about. Riley Flynn in Midnight Mass is the fullest use of it, a man who has come home carrying something he cannot put down, in a series that hands him long unbroken conversations to play instead of jump scares. He followed it with The Midnight Club in 2022 and young Roderick Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher in 2023: three straight years in the same corner of streaming horror.
The rest of the record is steadier than it looks. Devil's Due and The Purge: Anarchy were the jobbing genre years. Good Girls, L.A.'s Finest and Off the Map were the network work. Criminal Minds handed him Elias Voit, an antagonist that is the furthest he has ever been asked to travel from Saracen, and he is listed for a future Evil Dead film, which suggests the horror second act has some way to run yet.
Movies (13)
TV (12)
Where to start with Zach Gilford
Everything begins with Friday Night Lights, and nothing else is close. Saracen is the role the whole career is built on, and the show is one of the few American dramas about teenagers that treats them as people with jobs and debts rather than storylines.
Then jump forward to Midnight Mass, the adult version of the same performance: quiet, guilty, talking too much at exactly the wrong moments. It is the best horror on this list and the one to pick if you only watch one.
After that, The Fall of the House of Usher gives him the showiest material and The Midnight Club is the gentler companion piece. Criminal Minds is worth a look purely to hear him play something cold. The Purge: Anarchy and Devil's Due are the ones you can leave, since they use him as a face rather than an actor.