Here at GQ, we’re in the business of guys. Young leading men. Hollywood titans. Athletes of all types, musicians of all forms. Naturally, we’re also in the business of That Guys.
You know the guys I’m talking about—stalwart character actors with IMDb pages a mile long. You may not know their names, but you know their faces. And you feel a certain warmth, excitement, and familiarity when they pop up in a movie or TV show. Hey, you think, it’s that guy. When you see them, you have a personal guarantee that whatever you’re watching just got that much better.
In some ways, there’s never been a better time to be one of these guys, what with the absolute bounty of streaming series. The internet also has a knack for enthusiastically coalescing around what may seem, at face value, to be unlikely subjects—we're thrilled, for instance, to be able to type the words “Shea Whigham fancam.”
So, to acknowledge this rich and thriving ecosystem of guys, we gathered GQ staff and contributors to share their appreciation of that one That Guy they feel a special affinity for. And, of course, to answer the age-old question: Who’s your guy?
Let’s get right out of the gate with a classic: my man Shea Whigham. He first caught my attention in the carnival of Guys that was Boardwalk Empire (led, of course, by That Guy-turned-American icon Steve Buscemi). Between Boardwalk and Perry Mason, I'll always associate Whigham with smoky HBO shows, invariably involving him wearing some kind of historically accurate hat. But Whigham also has a solid, competent quality that's seen him more and more frequently drafted into blockbusters, from Fast & Furious to Kong: Skull Island to last year's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. When you get him in a comedy—particularly a comedy from the Danny McBride Cinematic Universe—the results are sublime. In sum: I’m proud to be a card-carrying member of the Whig Party. And you know who else is? Elite That Guy Walton Goggins. When Goggins spoke to Vulture last year about a pilot he was once making with Whigham, he recalled saying, “Just get me Shea Whigham, He’s the sauce, he’s the special, special sauce.” Preach it! — Gabriella Paiella
The best character actors are narrative switchblades, fit to be whatever the story or ensemble needs them to be. As such, the great Stephen Root can do everything from mysteriously eccentric mentor (NewsRadio) to sensitive sad sack (True Blood) to hilariously smarmy asshole (Justified). The throughline: whether he's supporting cast or just a recurring guest star, he's damn sure going to make that person feel both lived-in yet woefully underutilized. For the Root experience in a microcosm look no further than Barry, which across four seasons called upon him to transition from incidentally dangerous bumbling idiot to a believably threatening crime boss—and he handles both with aplomb. When Stephen Root pops up on your screen, it's a guarantee a new favorite character just emerged. — Frazier Tharpe
Leonard Cohen had very few acting credits; one of them was a 1986 episode of Miami Vice. One of the greatest singers of his generation, playing a crooked French INTERPOL agent, saying lines (in subtitled French!) like “He has stolen the morphine…He must be killed.” I wish Cohen had been in more movies, racking up impressive character-acting credits in between albums and stints in the zendo. We didn’t get that; we have something approximate in the sideline acting career of the great singer-songwriter Will Oldham. Oldham was actually an actor first—he played the teenage preacher in John Sayles’ Matewan and the dad in a TV movie about “Baby Jessica” McClure before losing interest, taking up music, and becoming a celebrated indie-rock performer in his early 20s. By the time he started showing up onscreen again, he was balding and eccentrically mustachioed, playing characters (in films by Kelly Reichardt, David Lowery, and Rick Alverson) not unlike the earthy and haunted narrators of his songs, while looking like someone the casting director discovered at the hardware store. A cult musician, but a rock star by That Guy standards; when he showed up in the trailer for Bikeriders, as a bartender who doesn’t want any trouble but gets it anyway, I recognized him before he spoke, just by the shape of his head. — Alex Pappademas
Bill Camp might be our patron saint of televised weariness. His characters are overworked, underloved, self-critical, prone to deep sighs. They have all, every one of them, Seen Some Shit. They are detectives, janitors, lawyers—workers, all, who clock in and out while our main character busies him or herself with character development. (Anya-Taylor Joy got to leave that dank basement for life as a globe-trotting chess champion; as far as I know, Camp is still down there.) Camp, right now, is a regular presence on my TV thanks to his role in the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent, playing a district attorney-turned-defense lawyer who is both exceptionally talented and exceptionally exhausted. He looks like he can't wait to get home and have a beer. Neither can I. — Sam Schube
There's brilliance inside Patrick Fischler: the way he moves, the way he talks, the way he weaponizes his eyeballs, which always seem to be scanning, reading, processing. Probably the most famous (and beautiful) display of his talent was his stretch on Mad Men as Jimmy Barrett, the acid-tongued, spark-quick comedian who peeled the flesh from Don Draper’s skeleton to expose all of Draper’s rotten innards with a single sentence. (“You’re garbage… and you know it.”) But pull up any of his scenes from any of his movie or TV appearances— Mulholland Drive, The Lincoln Lawyer, Old School, 2 Guns, etc— and what you find, again and again, is brilliance; an actor in complete control of his skill set, of a moment, and of all the pieces therewithin. — Shea Serrano
We all know the heavy hitter That Guys—your Whighams, your Fichtners, your Ivaneks. I’d like to talk about a more unsung Guy: Thomas Rosales Jr. You’ve seen him before, right? Classic as a henchman (Con Air, 7 episodes of Walker Texas Ranger), gang member (The Replacement Killers, Escape From L.A.), or prisoner (Face/Off, U.S. Marshals). Maybe he was getting stomped by a marauding T. Rex (The Lost World), or getting shot because Waingro had to get it on (Heat). If violence isn’t your thing, he’s danced at Arnold’s with Fonzie and the crew (Happy Days) and interrupted Cool Ethan’s upsetting daydream (Slackers). Speaking of Arnolds, Schwarzenegger did five movies with the guy—clearly Arnie liked shooting, beating and/or blowing him up. Spotting Keith David in Roadhouse or Erick Avari in The Mummy is all well and good, but cross-referencing guys like Rosales, whose lines are often things like “[YELLS BEFORE/WHILE DYING]”, really make sickos like me feel like they’re seeing behind the curtain. He’s in so many things that I love, and so many that were formative, that spotting him is always a delight. As all real showbiz pros do, Rosales understands his whole deal—his IMDb profile photo is him getting eaten by a giant desert worm in Tremors 2. — Patrick Monahan
“They didn’t understand it.” So laments Father Leviatch, the priest moonlighting as a high school stage director in Lady Bird—one perfectly played part among many for Stephen McKinley Henderson. A longtime stage actor, Henderson specialized in the work of playwright August Wilson before expanding into film some 30 years into his career. Henderson is especially adept at switching between working-class characters—Casey Affleck’s boss in Manchester By the Sea; Denzel Washington’s garbage-collector best friend in Fences, a part he first played on Broadway—and more authoritative roles, like doctors in films as varied as Causeway and Beau Is Afraid. He plays all of his characters with precisely the ease and believability that keeps dramas (and, in Lady Bird, comedies) down to earth; he's both a quietly delightful presence and a grounding one. Father Leviatch’s lament about the uncomprehending audience for his production of Merrily We Roll Along never applies to anyone watching Henderson work. He puts everything across with the utmost clarity. — Jesse Hassenger
Boardwalk Empire was, as we know, such an amazing repository of Guys. Though it was frequently seen as a lesser entry in the great canon of HBO dramas, I adored it in part because of the high consistency of great dudes, some of whom I had previously encountered—say, Michael Stuhlbarg—and others who were completely new to me. Enter Paul Sparks: On the show Sparks played Mickey Doyle, a gangster with a wild giggle and a high voice. This is not, of course, how Sparks actually sounds, but that's what makes him such a key Guy. He's both always memorable and alway transformable. He can be terrifyingly menacing in movies like Thoroughbreds and Mud, yet for some reason I'm always happy to see him. — Esther Zuckerman
The highest form of That Guy connoisseurship is noticing a familiar face in a completely unexpected context, so you can imagine my delight at seeing the great William Sanderson, who I know best as the lovable idiot scoundrel of an innkeeper in HBO’s Deadwood, in a small part in the 1989 miniseries adaptation of Lonesome Dove. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: he was playing, if not the exact same character, a variation on a theme, a particular kind of Western moron which Sanderson’s high-pitched drawl just suits. He has considerably more range than that—for more, you can read his memoir, which is literally titled Yes, I’m That Guy. But it’s also a more universal archetype than you might expect: If his turn in the original Blade Runner is to be trusted, they’ll still have idiots with a high-pitched drawl in the dystopian future. — Chris Cohen
No one plays annoyed better than Henry Czerny. Whether it’s Sharp Objects, Supergirl, Ready or Not, or, yes, Mission: Impossible, Czerny is a stalwart face of the “I’m too old for this shit” mentality. The way he treats Ethan Hunt throughout his appearances in the Mission films is an understanding that he’s good at his job, sure, but at the expense of making everything so damn difficult for everyone else around him. That’s the case for something like Ready or Not, too, where he acts like an oversized petulant child. If you need someone with the appearance of a steely exterior hiding a deeply irritated center, Czerny’s the only That Guy for the job. — William Goodman
Danny Huston is Hollywood's boss nepo baby, the half brother of Princess Anjelica and the son of King John. He has most recently materialized, perfectly utilized, in Yellowstone pal Kevin Costner’s recent passion project Horizon—in starched Union blues, polished brass buttons, and manicured Ulysses S. Grant facial hair, he’s the only man in Wyoming territory with a pedicure. Of course Huston is given the voice of authoritarian manifest destiny and imperial American might, behind a sturdy oak desk with a healthy pour of scotch in a diamond-cut rocks glass. Born with a simultaneously smarmy and comforting teddy-bear face composed almost entirely of jowl, he has a natural aristocratic bearing Lee Strasberg could never teach. He is cinematic royalty and looks every bit of it, a prince baby-man you would gladly hand power of attorney over to when pairing a Napa Valley hammer with a prime rib at 4 Charles. — Abe Beame
I do not know when I first encountered Joe Lo Truglio, or when he started popping up in enough things for me to go, "Hey, there's That Guy!" All I know is that if he's on screen, I'm laughing. Upon researching him for this, I learned that he's been working for my entire life, dating back to his days with the comedy troupe The State. Personally, I know him best as “Squeaky Voice Guy” in I Love You, Man and “Guy Who Hits a Teenager with His Car and Then Asks if He's on MySpace” in Superbad. He also plays a character in the 2003 classic Hitch who's officially credited as “Music Lover Guy.” What a beautiful career. — Matthew Roberson
If you told me that John Turturro has appeared in every single movie and most network television shows created in the last four decades, I would find a way to believe you. Talk about a character actor for the ages: He tongued that bowling ball in The Big Lebowski. He was a man of constant sorrow in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Hell, he won an Emmy for playing Monk’s brother in Monk! He’s had recent flashier prestige turns in The Night Of and Severance, but it’s safe to say that over his 40-plus years in the biz, Turturro has That Guy’d himself into undeniable stardom.
What is it, I wonder, that makes Turturro feel like the secret ingredient that makes every movie better? Maybe it’s his crispy-around-the-edges, born-in-Brooklyn-raised-in-Queens accent that puts him at home in all the great New York movies (Desperately Seeking Susan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Do the Right Thing). Or his working friendships with Spike Lee, Adam Sandler, and the Coen brothers that rightfully make use of his chameleonic dramedic chops; or his unforgettable goatee. Either way, when he recently showed up as a pervy rich dude in an episode of the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith reboot, I still pointed at my screen like Leo and said, “Hey, it’s John Turturro! That’s my guy!” — Eileen Cartter