Among copious multi-hyphenate celebrities in Hollywood, Neil Patrick Harris is something harder to find: a true entertainer and consummate showman. Culturally, he’s as modern as they come, but he has the cool aplomb of greats like Dean Martin Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal. He can pull off a little song and dance, a bit of ad-lib banter and a few magic tricks with the same effortless cool as a big opening number. He’s hosted the Tony Awards four times, for which he’s won several Emmys (see how that works?), and the Emmys themselves twice, not to mention the Academy Awards. The AP drama desk recap of the 2013 Tonys ran, “The reviews are in: It was a great Tony Awards. The dancing was inspired, the singing top-notch and the humor sly – and that’s just for the host. Neil Patrick Harris once again proved how invaluable he is.” The show’s co-producer Glen Weiss explained why. “He’s completely the real deal, totally multi-talented. He cares about the theater and you can’t make that up.” The audience certainly didn’t fake the two-minute standing ovation they gave his opening number.

Hosting the Academy Awards is probably the most fraught gig around, but Variety said his handling of the 2015 Oscarfest suggested he was the right guy for the job. “Harris celebrated the movies in a cheeky but earnest way… An old pro in these settings despite his boyish looks, Harris immediately brought an infectious personality to the proceedings that let a little air out of all the puffery.

Harris is the host, but he’s also having a great time at the party.

And that’s saying something for a guy who’s been in the business since age 15. His parents sent him to a drama camp in his home state of New Mexico, partly in hopes he’d get an idea of how tough it was to make it in show business. Instead he got discovered and cast opposite Whoopi Goldberg in Clara’s Heart. The next year he was starring in Doogie Howser, M.D., which ran for four years. While he’s never quite escaped association with the role, he’s managed to escape the box it could’ve put him in. In fact, his sense of humor about it might be the very thing that prevented such a fate. He gleefully (but lovingly) spoofed our Doogie-fied perception of him by playing a wild, coke-snorting libertine in 2004’s Harold & Kumar go to White Castle. So it was less of a stretch for creators of How I Met Your Mother to see him as Barney Stinson, the womanizing, hyper-hetero connoisseur of all things bro, generating legion catchphrases and fans. The series ran for nine years and earned him four Emmy nods. Variety once again called it in its review of the show’s first season: “The major breakout here is Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie!) as Ted’s peculiar friend Barney.” The same year HIMYM was winding down, movie work picked up. In 2014 Harris played a just-slightly-off, ill-fated ex-boyfriend in David Fincher’s dark Gone Girl and a less-drastically ill-fated ex-suitor in A Million Ways to Die in the West, of which RogerEbert.com said, “A scene-stealing Neil Patrick Harris can do more with a raised eyebrow than Seth MacFarlane can with an entire monologue.” We refer any remaining doubters to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog or the four-character tour de force otherwise known as A Series of Unfortunate Events. NPR cited his Count Olaf as the reason the Netflix version worked even better Jim Carrey’s big-screen take. “Mostly, Harris’ Olaf vibrates at a lower frequency. When he’s not being performatively nasty, he seems merely … annoyed. Tetchy. Distracted. Impatient. Vexed at the world for not appreciating him. It’s smaller, and feels truer, than anything Carrey managed to find in the character.”

But back to that “caring about the theater” thing. Since 1997, he’s performed in 15 stage productions, including Rent, Sweeney Todd, Proof, Cabaret (as Emcee, who else?), Assassins, and in 2014, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which required losing 20 pounds, straining his vocal chords and (we’re assuming) doing things he’s never done in heels before. The New York Times theater critic wrote, “As ‘an internationally ignored song stylist’ of indefinable gender, Mr. Harris is in full command of who he is and, most excitingly, what he has become with this performance. That’s a bona fide Broadway star, the kind who can rule an audience with the blink of a sequined eyelid. But Mr. Harris has much more than marquee and recognition value. He also has a master entertainer’s gift for making the rough go down smoothly. From the moment his Hedwig makes her David Bowie-esque entrance, we’re his to do what he will.” It’s a good thing he didn’t host the Tonys that year; it might have been awkward presenting the Best Lead Actor in a Musical award to himself, though his acceptance speech would no doubt have killed.

Harris has done what the industry doesn’t often let you do – escape a role or label. He played Doogie for years, Barney for even more, then announced he was gay and just moved on. Professionally, anyway. In his personal life, he’s become somewhat of an icon of gay acceptance. Time named him to their 100 Most Influential People list, and with a Twitter following of 10 million, it’s hard to argue. Producer/director Josh Whedon: “He’s been nominated for an Emmy three times for his role as hetero hound Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother not because he’s playing straight but because he’s very funny… He can get the girl and sing about the boys, and it all works. The public’s perception of gay men is shifting because of this guy, and they’ll be too entertained to notice. That’s more than a good trick. That’s magic.” In a hilarious guest spot on The Colbert Report, Colbert accused him of an insidious plot to make us like gay people. No matter how bro-ish, disturbingly creepy, or downright evil he might be as any given character, making us truly dislike him is an acting feat even Harris might not be able to pull off, unless the impish glint in his eye can be surgically removed. It probably can’t be helped; he loves what he does too much. And with well over 100 film, TV and theater credits to his name, it seems he can’t do too much of what he loves. As he puts it, “I’ve never been a fame whore. I just like working.” Too bad they don’t gave out awards for understatement.

He’s also written two books; his Choose Your Own Autobiography spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and his kids’ book The Magic Misfits came out earlier this year. He’s also the creator and host of NBC’s upcoming Genius Junior, a game show testing the smarts of brilliant kids. Like history’s best hosts, he has a restless, inventive, and wonderfully nutty mind and a warm and wicked wit. He puts it like this: “I’m a big fan of making happiness and education and entertainment.” Let’s hope the NPH show goes on for a long, long time.

The best and most interesting art asks us to hold conflicting ideas in our head and grant that they might both be valid – a concept that makes us particularly nostalgic these days. In the realm of punk music, no band forced that perspective like X, one of its most important and iconic definers.

Co-founder and bassist John Doe is himself a study in duality, a poetry student in steel-toe boots who drove west from Baltimore and proved there was room for musicianship, diverse influences and even occasional humor in punk’s loud, sloppy, angry, three-chord aesthetic. Along with Billy Zoom, Exene Cervenka and D.J. Bonebrake, Doe and X became a shining nuisance for purists with strict ideas on what the L.A. DIY music scene of the 70s and 80s was all about. As No Depression put it, “For John Doe and Exene Cervenka of X, there was room in the adrenaline rush of punk for the full range of human experience, including politics, romance, melody and even older music.” Doe would probably just say they wanted to play music that wasn’t bullshit.

He grew up in Decatur, Illinois, where his first show involved going classroom to classroom in fifth grade, playing “House of the Rising Sun” on a borrowed guitar. After college on the East Coast he moved to L.A. because “it’s the place of dreams, my friend.” It seemed a place where people could roam and reinvent themselves; plus, he’d long been a fan of the noir novels that made the underbelly of the city strangely beautiful. He settled into fairly crappy digs and signed up for a poetry workshop where he met Cervenka. X played their first gig in their house for about 40 people. By 1979, lines wrapped around the Whisky A Go Go for their shows, and they had yet to release an album. Major labels didn’t get punk, let alone an act that was pushing its boundaries with tinges of country, actual storytelling and harmonies that could sound like nothing ever heard before in recorded music. It was unlike anything else, and it was thrilling.

The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek did know what to do with them. He produced their first album, 1980’s Los Angeles on indie label Slash Records. Writing about a collection of songs it called remorseless, exhilarating, wrenching and funny, Rolling Stone said that in tracks like “Sugarlight”, “Nausea” and “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” “X have already perfected a style that achieves jolting effects through enormously compressed, elliptical imagery held together by succinct, brutally played guitar and drum riffs. Such a strategy – poetry plus power–unites the band with influences from opposite coasts.” The next year they released Wild Gift, which was named Record of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Rolling Stone, which anointed it “the best album by an American band this year and the finest American punk album ever,” its critic writing, “X are too worldly and worn to believe in a born-again future – for music, love or society – that doesn’t involve making an uneasy peace with the past.” It took those two albums selling tens of thousands of copies for a major label (Elektra) to get interested. The band made five more albums before essentially breaking up in the late 80s, but X continues to reunite and tour regularly, their relevance still deeply intact. As Cervenka recalled, “I remember going to [L.A. club] The Masque and watching bands and feeling awe, bliss and gratitude at how amazing the scene was, even though there was pee on the floor and drunk people walking around. It was transcendent, and I feel that now. We are still alive. We’re still playing music. People are still coming to see us – lots of young people – and they tell us our music got them through bad times or their kid turned them on to us or their parents turned them on to us. Everybody that comes to see us has a story. This is exactly how punk was supposed to end up.”

That’s one very valid viewpoint. Doe collected many others in 2016’s Under the Big Black Sun, a seminal book about punk’s heyday in which his is only one perspective. He had Los Angeles punk’s most influential artists contribute essays with their own take on its salient people, places and events. The Los Angeles Review of Books noted it wasn’t the first book about the scene, but perhaps the first that truly took us inside. “We don’t read books like this just to get information; we read them so we can imagine we were there. If a book on its own can’t fully communicate what the music sounded like, it can convey how exciting and important it felt to get up on a stage and scream into a mic to other passionate freaks at a shitty dive behind a porn shop in Hollywood in 1977. Go look up that performance by The Zeros or The Brat or The Bags or The Germs after reading Under the Big Black Sun. It’ll feel new now.”

Doe’s Renaissance-man career includes acting in over 60 films and TV shows (Slamdance, Great Balls of Fire!, Boogie Nights, Roswell), contributing to film scores and to date, 11 solo albums. His first was 1990’s Meet John Doe, of which review site AllMusic said, “Now he’s out front, and the impact is quite immediate. Meet John Doe roars into action with a blaze of Texas-styled rhythm guitar and a gorgeously weathered voice that’s a sheer delight to listen to. There’s no effort to deliberately go after a certain style, though; this all has the feeling of falling together naturally, the way the best albums often do. Many of the lyrics here verge on raw poetry and carry a breathtaking force…Doe’s worn voice is one of his greatest assets; the expansive sound of his music fits right in with that.” No Depression acknowledged the contradictions that Doe weaves so seamlessly and poetically in its review of his 1995 follow-up, Kissingsohard. “The lyrical content is what we’ve come to expect from Doe –bleak character portraits and surroundings, yet not without a glimmer of hope.” In describing his most recent release, last year’s The Westerner, American Songwriter said, “songs like the yearning ‘Alone in Arizona’ with its reverbed, almost spaghetti Western guitar and the closing ‘Rising Sun’ capture a raw, passionate Americana vibe that feels honest and emotionally driven. Doe is clearly one of the most distinctive and passionate voices to emerge from any American punk band, one that is as comfortable with the more in-your-face attitude of his legendary work with X as this folkier but no less edgy music.”

Listening to these albums, you hear influences of his music and literary heroes like Charles Bukowski and John Fante. You listen in black, white and sepia, hearing light and wide-open spaces and a tempered optimism for whatever might be over the next hill. Doe is 64, and given his statesman status, one could say he’s already summited. But he’s also an inveterate explorer who’s retained the “F*** yeah!” attitude that drove thousands of us, sweating, swarming and screaming, onto beer-drenched concert floors. But that’s never been enough for a guy whose creative life seems to depend on evolving. “A good songwriter and a good song has adventure and experimentation, and it kind of surprises you as it develops.” Doe’s an artist who always has, and always will.

You can almost time it. When a hometown kid arrives, the “we knew her when” pieces aren’t far behind. Shortly after The Help made Octavia Spencer famous, The Birmingham News interviewed Jefferson Davis High School guidance counselor Mrs. Evelyn Moore. “Whatever she did, she did it well and she was never shy. You knew she just had it…there was something about Octavia that stood out and everyone knew she would be something.” Evelyn Moore knew it. The Help writer/director Tate Taylor knew it. What took the rest of us so long?

Octavia Spencer graduated ol’ Jefferson Davis in 1988. She was one of seven kids raised by her mom Dellsena Spencer, who worked as a maid and died when Spencer was a teenager. She went on to Auburn University, where you might be surprised to learn she did not study to become an RN, considering it’s a job she’s done between 30 and 40 times on screen, along with an almost equal number of largely nameless cashiers and security guards.

Spencer actually majored in English with a double minor in journalism and theater, and the role she originally planned for herself was behind the camera. She worked in casting on a number of local Alabama productions and finally asked to audition for the role of a political agitator in Joel Schumacher’s A Time to Kill. “Joel said, ‘No honey, your face is too sweet. You can be Sandy [Bullock]’s nurse,’” Spencer recalls.

Well, there you have it. Her friend and fellow Southerner Tate Taylor encouraged her to move to L.A. in 1997 to pursue acting, and she quickly dotted scores of movies and TV shows, most often in the aforementioned capacities. As briefly or namelessly as she might have appeared, she grabbed us every time. Her face is sweet, but we learned it could morph in a moment to comic wide-eyed disbelief, steely don’t-screw-with-me resolve, wry skepticism, or genuine warmth – making her one of the best reactors in the business. Her roles in Big Momma’s House, Miss Congeniality 2, Beauty Shop, Moesha, Chicago Hope, and Ugly Betty, (to name 6 out of nearly 100), were often cited as one of their bright spots, and Entertainment Weekly named her one of Hollywood’s 25 funniest women. Yet after 15 years, most of us still knew her as, “Oh yeah, that funny, sassy black lady.”

Then came her appearance as the funny, sassy maid Minny Jackson in The Help, a role that was hers before the screenplay was ever written. When the author of the novel it was based on was having difficulty finding the character’s voice, she called her friend Octavia for help. When Spencer finally embodied Minny on the screen, The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Spencer’s scrappy Minny Jackson provides not only comic relief but a feistiness that shows that some maids found the gumption and means to get back at overbearing employers. Hers is a great character, the antithesis of Gone With the Wind’s Mammy, and she nearly upends this movie with her righteous sass.” You know the story from there. More raves, wide recognition and an Oscar ensued, and voilà! – no more nurse roles.

No, now she was being offered maids. And the offers were substantial, but Spencer knew she had to start saying no to stereotypes to continue growing as an artist, and that she’d need to step outside the studios to show what she could do.

She appeared in “Smashed,” James Ponsoldt’s 2012 rumination on alcoholism, and NPR called out her bitingly emotional performance as the mother of Oscar Grant, the young black man shot by a white Oakland transit officer in Fruitvale Station. Then came the dystopian sci-fi Snowpiercer and 2015’s Black or White, in which Spencer starred opposite Kevin Costner, playing Rowna Jeffers, the protective grandmother of a biracial girl. “Ms. Spencer turns the strict, truth-telling Rowena into a mighty force,” said The New York Times. “Her wide-eyed stare gives her the gravity of an all-seeing sage who doesn’t miss a trick and is not afraid to speak her mind. Rowena may be a clichéd Earth Mother, but Ms. Spencer imbues her with a fierce severity.”

She stepped back into studio films in a big, Oscar-nominated way with Hidden Figures, playing mathematician Dorothy Vaughan. Despite her reluctance to do period films (no “period” to date having been particularly uplifting to the African- American experience), her anger made her unable to resist. She thought a story about black women working for NASA in the ’60s had to be fiction. No – it was just one of many real stories that never get told.

Despite the range of roles she’s being offered now, Spencer’s joked that she’s yet to play anyone remotely like herself, a single, rom-com lovin’ kinda lady. But she sees one that very much fits the bill. At this year’s Makers conference she told Gloria Steinem “The role I’m destined to play is to be one of the greatest producers in Hollywood. It’s a huge undertaking, but I want to be a conduit for storytellers.”

She’s already put her money where her mouth is. She became a producer on Fruitvale Station to help with its financing, and continues to support minority directors and young actors. She’s currently producing a biopic series of Madame C.J. Walker, the first self-made African American female millionaire. Where she is not putting her money is homogeneity. “If I look down a list of characters on a film, and it doesn’t have gay, African-American or Latino characters, I’m probably not going to spend my money on the ticket,” she told Deadline. “When we stop supporting things with our dollars that don’t represent all of us, then you’ll see an explosion of diversity. Art is about reaching people that you wouldn’t normally reach. It’s about bringing us together.”

Spencer determined long ago that BMWs and five-closet wardrobes weren’t going to determine when she arrived. It would be when she was steering the ship. But maybe the best measure of success is what you do with your ship when it comes in. “After Hidden Figures, I don’t have a problem saying to a room of male executives: ‘I need a female writer or a female director,’ or ‘I need a black voice or a Latin voice. I don’t feel bad about that.” To some, that might sound like sass. To us, it sounds like a boss.

Sam Rockwell has over 70 films, dozens of TV appearances, multiple stage credits and zero Oscars to his name, and some people are getting a little upset about that. Nomination demands from critics and film writers began back in 2009 with his virtual one-man show opposite himself as isolated astronaut(s) Sam Bell in Moon.

You get the feeling he’s always been something of a one-man show, at least in his head. He lived there a lot as the only child of actors who divorced when he was five. Rockwell was raised mainly by his dad in San Francisco, but spent a month each year with his mom in New York, where he made his stage debut playing Humphrey Bogart in an East Village improv comedy sketch she was starring in. It also involved hanging around her crowd of friends, dope-smoking, girl-kissing and singing telegram delivery. All of which made going back to school and basketball on the West Coast a little dislocating. “It was like being an alien.” It might also partially explain the sense of loneliness that often lurks beneath even his most antic characters.

Nevertheless, it was a life he romanticized, and in 1990 he became a struggling New York actor himself, studying with famed acting coach Terry Knickerbocker while working as a busboy, bicycle burrito-delivery guy and assistant to a private detective to pay the bills. (Why has no one written that movie?)

His breakthrough came in 1996 with Tom DiCillo’s Box of Moonlight, playing an eccentric man-child who dresses like Davy Crockett and lives in an isolated mobile home. It put him on the map – the indie map, anyway – and in 1998 alone he had three films at Sundance: He played a romantic outcast in Lawn Dogs, an inept criminal in Safe Men and an eager apprentice assassin in Jerry and Tom. The New York Times cited the triple-header as evidence of his range, even if it was a range of “rogues, crooks and oddballs.” Colleagues described him as the acting equivalent of a Swiss Army knife, and if the Academy didn’t notice, casting directors did. Thus began Rockwell’s history of frenetic line crossing – from indie to studio films, supporting roles to (occasional) leads and just about any genre invented.

After small but standout roles in The Green Mile and Galaxy Quest in 1999, he got the lead in 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind thanks to director George Clooney, who fought hard for him when studio execs wanted a bigger name. The Times wrote, “The film’s Chuck Barris, Sam Rockwell, does a mambo in his head between geekdom and desperation, and Mr. Rockwell does a dazzling job of conveying the seething confusion beneath his character’s dazed amiability.” The next year, he was equally enthralling as an exuberant, all-in con man opposite Nicholas Cage in Matchstick Men, a performance Entertainment Weekly said made him “destined by a kind of excessive interestingness to forever be a colorful sidekick.”

Putting aside the implications of that assessment for a moment, if you’re going to be accused of excessive anything, “interestingness” ain’t bad. He went on to prove it in The Assassination of Jesse James, giving unusual depth to the simple-minded Charley Ford, and then as a has-been basketball coach in The Winning Season. The Hollywood Reporter cited several fine moments in that under-seen film. “His character stands in for many people who, after high school glory in sports, find themselves lost in an adult world no longer interested in long-ago exploits. Rockwell demonstrates he has what it takes to play those bitter disappointments with some real emotions.” And then there was The Way, Way Back, a lighter but no less brilliant turn as the offbeat manager of a decrepit water park. The Atlantic’s film critic Christopher Orr wrote, “It’s Rockwell’s Owen – an overgrown boy in a movie full of regressing adults – who contributes most to the film’s air of compassionate whimsy. If this role, one in a series of sneaky-good performances that Rockwell’s been delivering for years, doesn’t finally earn him the recognition he deserves, I’m not sure what will.”

Rockwell’s a guy who brings lightness to villains, accessibility to nutjobs and a melancholy, dark side to heroes. He also brings complete commitment born of a ceaseless work ethic and the desire to better any project he’s involved in. His Iron Man 2 director Jon Favreau relies on that. “You’re not getting the guy phoning it in on the big ones and then being an artist on the small ones. He brings his game to all his roles.” ‘Jesse James’ co-star Jeremy Renner told The Guardian UK, “He’s completely fearless as an actor. There’s a real trap with some actors where they play so oddball they’re not accessible. But Sam finds a way home, every time. And you can’t wait for him to come on the screen again because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.” He’s an artist who’s willing to take risks, and that makes him a blast to watch on screen in any capacity.

Taking risks is something Rockwell thinks the business could do a bit more of, but doesn’t, attached as it is to financial success. He’s laughed that directors finally get to him after they’ve gone through all the unavailable leading men. He acknowledges he’s not your typical star or genre headliner. “I don’t know what the hell my category is.”

If he doesn’t, Salon might. In a 2013 interview, Rockwell’s expressed passion for 1970s American cinema led the magazine to speculate that he could’ve been a major star of that decade. “Nowadays you need classic good looks and a chiseled physique to be a Hollywood leading man. Compare that to the days when Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson were the biggest and most honored actors in the business.” That brings up the frustrating possibility that we’ve been denied some really interesting movies, which in turn brings up his latest, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. His supporting role opposite Frances McDormand as a racist small-town cop is renewing calls for an Oscar nomination.

“It’s Sam Rockwell who really punches through the ensemble with a dramatic arc and a reminder that the journeyman actor can be one of the best tools in a director’s arsenal,” wrote Variety in an early review. “As hateful Missouri law officer Jason Dixon, he’s clearly a few bricks shy of a load, a simpleton who is the product of his limited environment. But he’s by no means a caricature. Rockwell deserves supporting actor recognition for the emotional journey he’s able to convey with his character.” Writing from the Venice film festival, their film critic Owen Gleiberman went on to praise Rockwell for “daring to make himself gnarly and dislikable, only to undergo a transformation that the actor, mining his moonstruck ability to win laughs in even the most disturbing situations, makes spiritually convincing.”

It may be tough to describe what makes Rockwell such a riveting shape-shifter, but he likes a description of acting he once heard from Gary Oldman (another actor Hollywood took way too long to recognize with an Oscar nom): “It’s kind of like you’re taking a snow globe — you being the vessel, the snow globe — and you’re shaking up all this stuff that’s inside you from your past, and you have to kind of explore that again.” The past 29 years have proven Rockwell has an Atlas-sized globe to work with, and we hope he keeps roiling it. Whatever may fall out is far more worthy of anticipation than any statuette.

Jeff Daniels wants you believe he is the director of NASA. He also wants you to believe he has an IQ of eight. That we’ve bought both assertions must be gratifying. He’d always planned to build a career on his range; it just didn’t happen quite according to script.

He grew up in Chelsea, Michigan, and make a note of that, because it’ll be important in a couple paragraphs. He participated in theater programs at both Central Michigan University and Eastern Michigan University before moving to New York, where he performed with Circle Repertory Theatre and Second Stage Theatre.

And though an agent almost laughed himself off his chair when Daniels explained his previous stage experience was playing Tevye in an amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof, he got signed.

Daniels barely had time for a few curtain calls before landing three acclaimed movies. He made his screen debut in Miloš Forman’s Ragtime in 1981, and his very next film was his breakthrough as Debra Winger’s feckless husband in the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment. He tripled out with the lead in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. The second nomination came just a year later for his role in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild.

Daniels seemed on his way to the A-list as a likeable, safely good-looking leading man. As if for proof, GQ put him on its October 1987 cover, suggesting he might just be the next Cary Grant.

That’s when he hightailed it back to Michigan. A longtime theater mentor had once told him, “You’re not an actor, you’re an artist.” Daniels wasn’t sure what that meant, but. “I knew it didn’t mean going to L.A. and trying to be famous. It meant doing things that only good actors would try to do.” Off the bat, it meant founding The Purple Rose Theater Company, which provides training for actors, playwrights and other theater artists in Michigan and the Midwest region, and develops new plays based on life in the Great Lakes Basin. It meant writing his own plays. It meant picking up a guitar, and unexpectedly, a second career. Daniels has released six full-length albums of funny, homespun and lyrical songs, many distinctly flavored by his Midwestern DNA. Film-wise, he focused on lesser seen but generally praised indies like Sweet Hearts Dance, Checking Out and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael.

Being out of the 323 area code put him out of the running (or maybe just out of mind) for a lot of big Hollywood movies, which meant sometimes having to emerge from Michigan to make some dough. When the Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber came up, his agents advised him not to do it; insisting he wasn’t that kind of an actor, and that “Carrey will wipe you off the screen.” For his part, Jim Carrey wasn’t looking for a doppelganger, but someone who’d force him to listen and react.” That, friends, is what a good actor does. The Hollywood Reporter agreed. “Daniels was a good choice of co-star, since his laconic underplaying is a perfect counterpoint to Carrey…Daniels is quite appealing and displays a knack of his own for physical comedy.” In this case, to the tune of a $247 million box office take.

A few notable (Gods and Generals, The Hours) and not so notable (I Witness, Cheaters) films later, we were reminded what he can do with a lead and the right material in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. As Bernard Berkman, a professor of failed ambitions and a failed marriage, he took on an atypically off-putting character and saved him from complete asshole-dom with the hurt he can’t completely mask with pomposity. The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Daniels, while clearly delineating Bernard’s self-deluding vanity, makes him neither a monster nor a clown. He is, almost in spite of himself, a man of feeling, not above appealing to the pity of those he loves when he can no longer impress or intimidate them.”

‘Squid’ earned him a third Golden Globe nod, but Daniels returned to the theater, and some of his best work ever, in 2009’s God of Carnage and most notably in 2007’s Blackbird. Theater critic Ben Brantley said, “Maybe it’s because he inhabits his characters so completely, so I remember them as people I know rather than as figures in a play or movie, but I keep forgetting just how good Mr. Daniels is.”

But it was 2012 that truly ushered in what we’ll call The Renaissance of Jeff. He became a compelling and nuanced Sorkin interpreter (and Emmy winner) as the star of HBO’s The Newsroom and again with a nuanced performance in 2015’s Steve Jobs. Both seem to have made Hollywood start shelling out for airfare from DTW to LAX. Coming up, he’ll appear in the big screen drama The Catcher Was a Spy with Paul Rudd and Paul Giamatti, Hulu’s 9/11 drama series The Looming Tower, and the western Godless, a Netflix seven-part original series from Steven Soderbergh and Scott Frank, in which Daniels stars as notorious criminal Frank Griffin. He’s also working on another play, Flint, to remind people that things in his home state still aren’t fixed.

Daniels’ career seems to be accelerating just when most would be winding down. But at 62, he remains mistrustful of the proverbial 15 minutes. “Stars are something someone else does. The only thing I can control is becoming a better actor by the end of each movie.” Early on, he set a career goal: If he stuck around, he wanted to be known as a great American actor. Most would say he reached it a long time ago. We’re just glad he continues to prove it.

When FX marketing chief Stephanie Gibbons pitched the first ad campaign for Better Things to its star and creator Pamela Adlon, she laid out a series of visuals depicting every mom we’ve ever seen on TV: the busy career mom holding a baby and a briefcase, the harried housewife, the family scold, et cetera. The last image was Adlon – lying face down on a bed with her feet on a wall.

Adlon loved it. It wasn’t your typical ad for a TV comedy about a mom raising kids, but that’s exactly what Better Things isn’t. In the decidedly unvarnished, Emmy-nominated FX show based on her own life, Adlon plays Sam Fox, a divorced actress raising three daughters. She drinks, works, nurtures, dates and kvetches in equal, eloquent measure; reviewers have likened her unapologetic foul-mouthed rants (on family, suitors, and life in general) to comic arias. “My show is my flaws and the weird things about me that have kept me going — and also kept me from achieving,” says Adlon.

What got her going in the first place was her dad. Don Segall was a journeyman writer and producer for TV, as well as comic books and pulp fiction. Adlon grew up on sound stages in New York and L.A. telling jokes and warming up audiences, knowing it was the world she wanted to remain a part of. She did radio voiceover work at nine, and decided at 11 that having an agent sounded like the most fun ever. She read one spot for a Tide commercial and was signed immediately.

She landed her first feature (Grease 2) at 16 and a recurring role on iconic ’80s sitcom The Facts of Life the following year. She often played androgynous characters (Bad Manners, Willy/Milly), tomboys, or actual boys, once auditioning – successfully – for The Redd Foxx Show disguised as “Paul Segall.”

Her atypical looks might be one of the aforementioned “weird things” that kept her from achieving. Almost as quickly as she’d landed a permanent spot on the 1992 Fox sitcom Down the Shore she was written off. The producers didn’t feel she was good looking enough, as traditional young sitcom actresses go. “I went from buying my own condominium and a car for myself when I was 17 on The Facts of Life to not being able to pay my rent,” she told The New York Times. “I was at the unemployment office all the time.”

In her 20s and struggling, she was suddenly in need of something to keep her going. It turned out to be what got her going in the first place: voice work. She got parts on Rugrats and Recess, and in 1997, played her most famous boy yet: Bobby Hill, King of the Hill’s pudgy, endearing preteen. Auditioning cold, she came up with his raspy, world-weary voice on the spot. It won her steady paychecks, one of her all time favorite jobs, and an Emmy. She’s racked up 100 some-odd voice roles since, most recently as Vidia in Disney’s Tinkerbell comedy adventure series.

Her next steady live action gig came on Californication, hardly Disney material. She was originally supposed to appear in just the pilot and maybe a couple early episodes, but series creator Tom Kapinos just couldn’t stop writing for her. As Marcy Runkle she raunched her way through some of the show’s most depraved story lines. Kapinos called her the show’s secret weapon. “I feel like I can write anything for her, and she’ll knock it out of the park. There’s always a special joy when you write some filthy speech for her and know she’s going to turn it into magic. It’s like gutter poetry.” Adlon loved every moment of it, except the ones where she had explain her screen antics to her real-life daughters, or hearing that their school friends were fans.

Californication ran for seven seasons, and between that and other projects, Adlon had little time for another idea that had been on the backburner for a while – a show based on her own experiences as an actress and single mom who also values her individuality. She knew she had stories to tell, but worried that no one would be interested. Nevertheless, she made the decision not to over-fictionalize or sitcom-ize them. And it worked. If we had to guess why, it’s because the most personal stories often turn out to be the most universal.

Not only did Adlon have all the material she needed, but also a timely and essential perspective. “I did not set out to make a feminist show,” she told Vulture, but “I wanted to talk about women who are aging and aging parents. I wanted to talk about girls growing up. I wanted to show these three stages developmentally. It was extremely important for me to do it in a way that felt authentic.”

When you do that, people tend to respond. GQ recognized that “The humor in Better Things doesn’t come from a barrage of tightly written jokes or sight gags. Instead it issues naturally from the show’s embrace of the complex and often contradictory feelings inherent in the act of living a life that includes other people.” Salon praised it for “revealing new possibilities for what can be achieved within 30 minutes of storytelling.”

Adlon has grown in confidence as both a writer and a director, helming every episode the second season. That’ll keep you going. And there’s this: “Certainly when it comes to my daughters and my friends, my community—I’m deeply engaged, with the good and the bad. I’m very moved by my life.” Watching, so are we.

Why do we love mysteries and crime fiction so much? (And admit it, you do.) What are we looking for? Escape? Resolution, or even redemption? Maybe it’s the comfort of a protagonist who becomes a companion we know and return to, case after case. The best writers of such fiction satisfy all of those whys, and no one more so than Michael Connelly.

So let’s move on to the hows. First, he has a nose for a good story (it served him particularly well in coming up with The Lincoln Lawyer). It’s a sense he developed early on, reading his mom’s genteel mystery books and later devouring Raymond Chandler’s rough-and-tumble oeuvre in its entirety, falling in love with his portrayal of 1940s and ’50s Los Angeles. It was a long-distance romance for a kid from Fort Lauderdale, FL, but at least he could run down the local angle. Connelly got a job on the crime beat at the Daytona Beach News Journal, and then at the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, where he covered the South Florida cocaine wars. His work there earned him a Pulitzer nomination, and fatefully, in 1987, a job with the Los Angeles Times. But Connelly didn’t become a crime reporter to be a crime reporter; he became a crime reporter to become a crime fiction writer.

Which he did, in short order. After three years at the Times, he wrote his first published novel, The Black Echo, which introduced the world to his best-known character, Harry Bosch. Publisher’s Weekly said the tale “could substitute as a local guide book for an uninvited lowlife house guest. Connelly expertly combines the federal and local investigative procedurals with his journalist’s cold eye for accuracy. As an alternative to spending the weekend standing in line for a thrill ride, you might want to put Sonny Rollins on the stereo, grab a cold one, and crack open The Black Echo.”

After three more Bosch books followed to similar praise (and a big PR boost when Bill Clinton was snapped exiting a bookstore with a copy of The Concrete Blonde tucked under his arm), Connelly felt confident enough to quit the crime beat and start writing full time. He hasn’t stopped since.

In her review of last year’s The Wrong Side of Goodbye, noted critic Janet Maslin wrote, “The classic mystery plotting and streamlined storytelling are what render [Connelly] so readable. Of all the big-name writers who dominate this genre, Mr. Connelly is the most solid, old-school pro.” But you need more than a nose for crime, a PhD in plotting and an in at the LAPD to do what Connelly’s done, which is essentially to raise the page turner to something approaching art. In Connelly’s case, it’s the sense of place and broody glamour that’s so evocative on Bosch, the Amazon series based on his novels, and which underlies the elegiac tone of Blood Work, Clint Eastwood’s movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 book of the same name.

Maybe his unique sensibility is explained in his comparison of his work to Hieronymus Bosch paintings, with their multitudes of miscreants that wander the canvas. “They’re busy with stuff happening in every quadrant of the painting. It’s not all related, but yet, it is. In a Bosch painting, you can spend an entire day looking at one corner, and look at another corner of the painting the next day.” Not unlike the City of Angels itself. (And if you still need clues about how he came up with Harry’s full name, with all due respect, you are no gumshoe.)

Connelly has written a book a year for the last 20, and won nearly every major award ever given to mystery writers, amassing legion fans and continuing to inspire screen adaptations along the way.

Despite that pace, he is no churner; his process is organic. He’s known to listen to meditative jazz as he writes. He knows the beginning and end of his stories, but the middle is all improv. His characters often escape their own series and interweave, coming and going from those of their fellow creations. The most recent is LAPD Detective Renee Ballard, his first female to be given prime billing in her own series, which kicks off with The Late Show. Despite its initial doubts, The New York Times concluded Connelly could write women. “This new star is a beauty,” ran their recent review. “Smart and fierce, she never stops working, to the point of making Bosch look like a slouch. The novel moves so quickly, racking up so many witnesses and suspects, that it ought to be hard to follow. But Connelly expertly hides a trail of bread crumbs that leads straight to the denouement, with so much else going on that it’s impossible to see where he’s heading.”

Part of Connelly’s genius is satisfying the resolution demanded of crime novels while building them around protagonists whose lives remain complicated. We’re in for the people as much as the plot. They’re smart, tough, messy, sad, wry and funny. Bosch in particular keeps us coming back because unlike most of us, his convictions are never quite eclipsed by his cynicism. No wonder we want to ride along time and time again. Come take a spin with a guy we’ve loved shadowing for the last 25 years.

In the earliest days of her career, Emmy Rossum found herself at the Metropolitan Opera sharing the stage with (among others) Plácido Domingo, and a horse. How do you figure the pay scale works for a gig like that? A singer of Domingo’s stature makes tens of thousands per performance. The more talented horses in the production earned $150. Rossum, $5-$10 a night. Of course she was seven, but at those wages, even a kid has to know they’re not in it for the dough. About 25 years later, Rossum has multiple movies, awards, three albums, a lead role on the hit show Shameless and better paychecks to her name. But this is not a “how ya like me now, Domingo?” struggle-to-the-top story. She’s not that kinda gal. But if you like hearing about decent, determined artists who find their own way, learning and staying true to their instincts as they go, by all means, read on.

Rossum was raised in New York by a single mom who loved jazz, classical and opera music, so a stint on The New Mickey Mouse Club was probably never in the cards. A teacher who discovered her perfect intonation arranged an audition for the Met’s Children’s Chorus. She performed there until age 12, when she started outgrowing the kids’ costumes and decided to look into acting instead. She made her TV debut in 1997 on As the World Turns and her film debut (Genius) two years later. She came to wider attention as a flashback in Mystic River, playing Sean Penn’s murdered daughter, and the next year in sci-fi thriller The Day After Tomorrow. Her most notable performance in that period, Songcatcher, was not as widely seen, but more revelatory of her talent.

While Rossum was slowly finding her way as an actress by “constantly watching people who are better than me,” Joel Schumacher was busy, too, with his screen adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Rossum almost didn’t audition, but wound up coming in at the last minute, not realizing that he’d seen hundreds of people, and hers was the last audition for the role of ingénue Christine Daaé. She wasn’t too worked up at the time. After all, “I know I’m not getting it,” she told BlackFilm.com. “I never thought I’d get the part. I mean I was 16 years old and not famous and knew I was the youngest and least famous person going in for it.” Once the disbelief of actually landing the role wore off, she got worked up. She’d signed on to carry a $70 million adaptation of one of the most popular musicals of all time.

Phantom took in $155 million at the box office, and while reviews of the movie were mixed, reviews of Rossum were not. The New York Times said she “breathes fresh air into her claustrophobic, over-upholstered surroundings and brings both a spark of defiance and a touch of melancholy to her role.” Though her co-stars included Gerard Butler, Miranda Richardson and Minnie Driver, Roger Ebert said it was Rossum who carried the show (singing her own songs, of course). So, what next? Any agent worth his 10 percent would prescribe more good girl roles, a couple of ‘popera’ albums, more stage-to-screen musicals. But Rossum isn’t really one to build momentum or a brand off one signature role, no matter how fabulous. She preferred a plan, or lack thereof, that would let her stretch.

She chose a series of smaller, more complex roles in indies like Dragonball Evolution, Dare, and the anti-rom-com Comet, which IndieWire called a career best, citing her contribution to the film’s authentic feel. That’s not to say she can’t have fun when the role demands. As Beautiful Creature’s fast girl/teen “dark caster” Ridley Duchannes, “Rossum barnstorms through her role in a way that ensures you watch her and only her whenever she’s onscreen,” said The Hollywood Reporter of the 2014 gothic fantasy, which also starred Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Viola Davis.

She’s taken the same approach with music. Rather than the classical, pop, or opera she could’ve done post Phantom, she sought something that felt more emotionally honest. In 2007 she released Inside Out, a debut album of ambient, highly personal songs. In 2014, she recorded Sentimental Journey, a calendar-themed mix of old standards – from torch songs to ragtime ballads – that despite their authentic smolder, never let you forget her dynamic soprano range.

Her biggest and best-known departure from her Phantom days is of course Shameless, now starting its eighth season on Showtime. Rossum, opposite William H. Macy, leads the ruthless, shambolic, impoverished Gallagher clan as Fiona, its hard but warm-hearted center, barely holding the chaos together. She’s almost saintly, in a clubbing, drugging, sex-loving way. The role, and what Rossum does with it, is quite layered. TV review site Screener said the show’s seventh season “proves Rossum is worth every single penny she’s being paid — and so much more. We’ve seen Fiona grow up through her time on Shameless. Likewise, viewers have watched Rossum grow and mature as an actress, able to build up or destroy those watching her with just a few words. Without Rossum, Shameless would be an incredibly different story – and not one we’re sure we’d be as interested in watching.”

The show has helped her develop in other ways. She raised her hand to direct an episode last year, and has since directed TNT’s Animal Kingdom. And while she no doubt is worth every penny she’s paid on Shameless, those pennies turned out to be less than those of her male costar. She renegotiated not only for equal pay, but back pay. Once you’ve played second fiddle to a horse – no matter how talented – you don’t let it happen again. She’s outspoken about Hollywood’s continued casting couch issues and a staunch supporter of numerous causes, including YouthAIDS, breast cancer awareness, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Best Friends Animal Society, and marriage equality.

One thing about Phantom does still define her. “I thought its themes were about love and compassion and understanding of people who look different and are different. That was the one quality about my character that I really identified with,” she said in a 2008 interview. In building a career, especially in this business, all the striving can sometimes make you forget what your art actually has the power to do. “When I look back on my life, I want to be most proud of the kindness, love and loyalty that I expressed more than any success I may achieve.” If that’s her criteria, we’d say she found her way – and success – a long time ago.

Aside from reviews that consistently drain critics’ supply of superlatives, you’d think it would be hard to find a common thread in Rebecca Hall’s acting career. It’s spanned 25 years (she got her start at 10) with stage, TV and film roles and comprised ingénues, diffident girlfriends, domestic terror victims, troubled career women and manipulative upper class terrors. Small wonder the Los Angeles Times called her “capable of becoming anybody, anywhere.”

Actually, the thread is easy to spot. You won’t get far into any review of her work before you hit the word “intelligent,” time and again. Most of the women she plays are smart, and the way she plays them is pretty genius, too. Hall doesn’t burn up a screen as much as consume it with quiet intensity, enticing us with slow, subtle reveals of what’s going on inside her characters. The scenery chewing stuff “doesn’t interest me,” she told The Village Voice earlier this year. “One of my unhappiest states is to watch indulgent performances. I’m always looking for a counterintuitive way to do something that doesn’t feel like a repetition of an actor trope.”

Our theory is that she’s an intelligent actor because she’s an intelligent woman. She made her first smart acting choice at age ten. After somewhat reluctantly casting her in his television adaptation of Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn, Hall’s father, legendary British stage director and Royal Shakespeare Company founder Sir Peter Hall, asked her if she wanted to be a child actor, or an actor. She chose actor. She’d had her mom’s stash of Betty Davis movies on loop for years and knew exactly what kind of actor she wanted to be, and it wasn’t kids’ stuff. Hall considers her artistic parents (her mom is renowned opera singer Maria Ewing) and complex family life (her dad married four times) a gift; the way she sees it, a nonjudgmental acceptance of life’s ambiguities is one of acting’s primary requirements.

Hall studied English Literature at Cambridge, but dropped out shortly before her final year, ready to get on with what she’d known she was going to do anyway. She was reluctant to trade on her father’s work to secure some of her own, but knew the whispers of nepotism would come regardless. So why not take the plunge, get the whispering over with, and prove her own merits, whatever they might be? At 23, she took the role of Rosalind in Sir Peter’s production of As You Like It at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We’ll let the theater press tell the rest. On top of calling her “a young actress of glistening freshness and uncanny intuition,” The New York Times wrote, “Not since Vanessa Redgrave’s Rosalind for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961 has a performance in the part provoked such feverish, star-making praise…When she finally takes her hat off, letting her hair tumble to her shoulders, she keeps her eyes closed for a second, like a diver before the plunge. She knows that whatever follows isn’t going to be easy. As Ms. Hall presents the moment, Rosalind has never seemed braver.” The New Yorker said Hall “exquisitely conveyed the sometimes tremulous combination of knowingness and naïveté that characterizes Rosalind. If you knew and loved Rosalind’s lines, it was thrilling to hear the subtlety with which Hall delivered them.”

A casting director who witnessed the performance encouraged Woody Allen to cast her in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and suddenly Hall was Hollywood’s new discovery. GQ’s review ran, “In the annals of acting, you won’t find a feat more impressive than the one Rebecca Hall pulled off: almost stealing a movie in which Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson go lesbian. And she did it with fire-eyed soliloquies, not nude shots, and by making her character’s ambivalence about the meaning of betrayal the most heartbreaking conflict in the film.”

Roles in Frost/Nixon, Please Give and The Town followed to equal praise, and the Times doubled down in 2010: “Hall is among the fastest-rising, and most gifted, actresses of her generation.” Never mind she’d been “rising” ever since 2006 with her feature debut in Starter for 10 and The Prestige. Even a risky creep into horror (2011’s The Awakening) paid critical dividends, as did her first truly and deliciously unlikeable turn as Sylvia Tietjens in BBC Two’s Parade’s End (2011).

She topped them all in 2016’s Christine. “In lesser hands, the title role could have been hammy Oscar bait, wrote The Village Voice. ”Instead, Hall portrayed Christine Chubbuck, the Florida newscaster who shot herself to death on live television in 1974, with a low-key intensity that was simultaneously grim and heartbreaking.” And, we’d add, devastatingly human.

Hall has two films (Permission and The Dinner) out this year so far. Her third is Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, a true and fascinating origin story about the creator of Wonder Woman. It’s just now hitting theaters, but by all reports, she’s already stolen it. She’s also writing and painting when she can, and is adapting Nella Larsen’s novella Passing as a screenplay.

That Hall has managed to avoid getting bogged down in any one type of role, or one particular medium, or even in the Hollywood system itself is tribute to her well-documented intellect. That said, “No matter how crafted or technical a situation is, I still get there through gut feeling.” No real artist operates without the certainty of instinct. She probably knew that all along.

If you can become one of the most acclaimed and iconic actors in the business without letting the business define you, that’s a pretty neat trick. Nice work, Willem Dafoe! But wait, you say. What about all the villains – the outlaw biker in The Loveless, the counterfeiter in To Live and Die in L.A., the drug dealer in Light Sleeper? The Green Goblin, for Pete’s sake? Okay, duly noted, and he certainly makes a delightful psychopath.

But consider this. His first Academy Award nomination came with his breakout role in 1986’s Platoon as the compassionate Sergeant Gordon Elias. The Los Angeles Times called his smile of pure sweetness at the film’s end one of its most lingering images. There was his determined FBI agent Alan Ward in the excellent Mississippi Burning, the broadly comic turns in Mr. Bean’s Holiday and the shamefully under-distributed Go Go Tales. Oh, and then Jesus, of course – not such a bad guy. Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ may have been more controversial than Dafoe expected, but his performance was widely praised. The New York Times wrote, “Willem Dafoe has such a gleaming intensity in this role, so much quiet authority, that the film’s images of Jesus are overwhelming even when the thoughts attributed to him are not.” We submit that for every Rat (Fantastic Mr. Fox) there’s an equally compelling Gill (Finding Dory).

Maybe Dafoe has made a career of defying expectations by not having any. He once told The A.V. Club, “If you know what [your performance] is before you even start, it’s not as interesting,” and that could also apply to the way he’s approached his career. Inspired by improvisational theater, he had no immediate dream except perhaps escaping his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin. He studied drama at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee but left after a year and a half. He moved to New York in 1976 to apprentice at avant-garde theater troupe The Performance Group, and later joined the Wooster Group, a renowned experimental theater.

He took a break from that world to try movies in 1980. His first, Heaven’s Gate, did not go well; he was summarily dismissed for ill-timed laughter on set. Nevertheless, the break extended to over 100 films. You know the big ones, but here we pause to provide a too-brief cheat sheet of don’t-misses you might’ve missed: The Boondock Saints (1999); Pasolini (2014); The Hunter (2011); and most definitely, Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Even a short survey shows his talent lies beyond being able to play good or evil; it’s playing characters that walk the line between, electrifying the screen in the process.

So you might imagine he’s a pretty complex, process-y kind of artist. Or not. He’s basically a guy who loves pretending and believes most “character work” is simply done in casting. He’s pliable, game for anything, not particularly needy as an artist, and thinks script and story provide the best framework for his characters. “A lot of actors get into this profession to be king of the world. I don’t want to be king of the world,” he told The Guardian in 2013. “For me the thing is not to have expectations and let them harden. The best thing an actor can be is ready. Be flexible, be ready.” If that sounds like a director’s dream, maybe that’s why so many cast him repeatedly in their films. And for that matter, he actually doesn’t want to direct, calling himself a better doer than a watcher. Indeed, one review of The Hunter meditated on the pleasure of just watching Dafoe do stuff. “The movie is at its finest when it just sits back and watches him track his semi-mythical prey through the misty Tasmanian wilderness. As he checks maps, skins marsupials, sets traps and examines paw prints, his stern face looks as etched and weathered as the landscape – and it’s somehow fascinating. Jean-Luc Godard said all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun; all The Hunter needs is Dafoe and a dead wallaby.”

Lucky us, then, that he still loves doing stuff, and continues to do so much of it. So far this year, we’ve been treated to his work in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project and What Happened to Monday. And coming up, he’ll star in the drama Opus Zero and appear opposite Kenneth Branagh and a bevy of big names in November’s highly anticipated adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. And never fear, Marvel-heads: he has a forthcoming Nuidis Vulko double-header in Justice League and 2018’s Aquaman.

Does any common thread emerge in a CV that spans 40 years? He may not have a process or a plan, but he’s always specialized in being there – being present, open and available to possibility. Another neat trick for an artist of his experience and status. “I set myself challenges every time I work,” he told IndieWire last year. “Ideally, I approach everything as though it’s the first time – with a beginner’s mind and an amateur’s love.” And bottom line, it’s probably that love that sustains him. Dafoe recalls director and frequent collaborator Paul Schrader once telling him, “You know what your problem is? You actually like doing this.” To which we say, sounds like a pretty good problem to have.

Not much in Chadwick Boseman’s early life would lead you to think he would become an actor. Not his birthplace (Anderson, South Carolina), not his family (his mom was a nurse, his dad an upholstery business owner), not his interests (he was the quiet one who played sports). Not one thing, it seems, except he just decided.

A sad incident in his last years of high school prompted him to write and then direct his first play, after which he simply decided that’s what he’d do. He studied at Howard University and later at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, and in short order, commenced writing plays: His 2006 Deep Azure was nominated for a 2006 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work, and the Chicago Tribune called it “Fascinating…Especially because the 28-year-old Boseman is a fresh talent – a young, sophisticated African-American writer with all of the flaws that flow from youth and inexperience and all of the excitement that draws from those very same places. With a slate of cultural references complex enough to encompass the likes of jazz-speak, Shakespeare, Hebrew, Louis Farrakhan and Spider-Man, Boseman offers a creative, slick and arresting employment of theatrical language and imagery.”

But Boseman had also taken some taking acting classes in college. At the time, it was just to learn how to work with actors, but in 2008 he decided he was ready to become one himself. He got a few TV parts here and there (L&O, Lincoln Heights, Persons Unknown), but film parts – many of which he was sure he’d get – eluded him. One of those was in Django Unchained. Boseman wasn’t cast, but after his audition, director Quentin Tarantino told his casting director, “That guy is going to be something.” But what? Those were lean years, and Boseman was on the verge of re-committing to the stage. That’s when he got the call to read for 42, playing Jackie Robinson opposite Harrison Ford. Director Brian Helgeland tells a story of his audition: “[Boseman] came in and said, ‘You’re either going to like me or not, and we’re going to know in five minutes.’ He had to play one of the bravest men who ever lived, so I thought that he came in brave was a great indication.”

It was brave, considering Robinson himself had played the role in 1950’s The Jackie Robinson Story. Most reviewers felt Boseman did the better job. His bravery was put to the test again when he was asked to audition for the role of James Brown in 2014’s Get On Up. Boseman hesitated (the moves alone would’ve scared even more flexible men), but director Tate Taylor knew it was about more than the Mashed Potato. He needed to see Boseman play Brown in his 60s. “That was the Achilles heel of the whole project,” Taylor told The Guardian in 2015. “I thought, if this isn’t perfect, we will fail, and the whole tone will be wrecked. I need the best fucking actor I can find… and he nailed it.’” Variety agreed, calling his performance faultless. “Chadwick Boseman plays Brown from age 16 to 60 with a dexterity and invention worthy of his subject. We have a chance to see this remarkable actor in full bloom, whether he’s giving life to Brown’s signature dance moves…or burrowing deep into the performer’s tortured, little-boy-lost soul. He feels Brown from the inside out, the way Brown felt his own distinctive rhythms, and even when the movie itself seems to be on autopilot, Boseman never leaves the captain’s chair.”

Suddenly, Boseman seemed the go-to guy for movies about iconic black figures. It’s something he initially resisted, but this month finds him in Marshall, a biographical thriller about the first African-American Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and one of the first cases in his career. Boseman is obviously in possession of a strong will, but like most real artists, he’s powerless when it comes to a great story.

His most iconic character yet may actually be fictional. Last year he joined Marvel’s blockbuster Captain America: Civil War as T’Challa/Black Panther, a brilliant scientist and king of the unconquerable African nation of Wakanda, not to mention a shrewd tactician and fighter. As the first in a five-picture deal with Marvel, it’s of no small significance to Boseman’s career. So is the fact that he’ll be the first black superhero starring in his own Marvel film when Black Panther premieres in 2018. NPR said his “regal performance” in Captain America “makes you wish it were arriving sooner.” If “you” means the 90 million people who watched the film’s teaser trailer within four hours of its release, that sounds about right.

But back to that decision to write and direct. Boseman has said he’s learned you have to choose a clear point of entry to the business, but once you define yourself, you can go into other arenas. That’s good, because we need artists like him pushing from behind the camera as well. However he decides to tell his stories, we’re listening.

If you didn’t already know how the story turned out, you might assume Nick Kroll’s upbringing (conservative Jewish), schooling (Rye County Day, Georgetown University), and degrees (history major, Spanish and art minors) would one day lead to a cardigan-clad professorship. We’d argue it actually did. He became Professor Poopypants, the most gloriously nefarious science teacher to ever steal a hit animated movie. That would be Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, with an epic box office of $104 million to date. If RogerEbert.com handed out grades, he’d have gotten an A. “The way Kroll savors every syllable of his alternately peevish, self-pitying and nonsensical dialogue transforms the ridiculous into the sublime.”

All along, Kroll’s real field of study has been comedy, first in high school skits and talent shows, and then sketch and improv in college, which is where he realized it would become his life. “Nothing beats doing comedy. I eat it, breathe it, sleep it. It’s the first and only thing I’ve ever loved doing. There’s never been a backup plan for me.” He moved to New York, put in time with UCB, taught improv to pay the rent and did standup before moving to L.A. to chase pilot seasons.

Not many people would equate comedy with job security, but Kroll does. “There’s so many ways to make a living,” he wrote in Georgetown Alumni Online. “There’s podcasts, web stuff, writing, standup…” And, as it turned out, acting. He’s since used every one of them to create art, content and a career that’s left him at the whim of no one but himself.

He got work doing various characters on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, but his break came on the 2007 sitcom Cavemen, based on the Geico commercial characters. It wasn’t the stuff of Emmys awards, but it got the ball rolling. Gigs on Best Week Ever, Reno 911!, Sit Down, Shut Up and Adult Swim’s Children’s Hospital further sharpened his comedy chops. In 2009 he landed a starring role as Rodney Ruxin, the over-anxious, over-sexed, insecure Jewish fantasy football fan on The League, for which he also wrote.

All the time, he was working on more ideas and characters, most of whom we met in 2013 on his own Comedy Central sketch series Kroll Show. It was the best and most meta use to date of his gift for sharply observed satire, sending up reality shows and the people that populate them. If you wanted to celebrate everything gloriously awful about the genre, it was your one-stop shop. Kroll led the parade, playing most of the inmates. There was straight-outta-Jersey Bobby Bottleservice, craft-services worker Fabrice Fabrice, Latino shock jock El Chupacabra, Liz G. of PubLIZity and Aspen Bruckenheimer of Rich Dicks — all hyper-performative and hyper-self-involved, if not hyper self-aware.

Kroll Show ended in 2015, but its residents are living long and extended lives on Funny Or Die, Comedy Bang! Bang! and in his live comedy special Nick Kroll: Thank You, Very Cool, which ComedyReviews.com said, “figured out the very best way to incorporate characters into a show without it feeling forced. Kroll has devised a way to make each person a different part of the live show-going experience. Each one of Kroll’s alter egos is incredibly funny and his sincere knack for improvisation can’t help but shine through. There are no ‘fast-forward this one’ characters in the bunch; each one has their own distinct quirks and idiosyncrasies that distinguish them from each other and makes them all uniquely hilarious for very specific and different reasons.”

But the best-known characters to emerge from Kroll Show yet are Gil Faizon (Kroll) and George St. Geegland (comedy partner John Mulaney). They’re cranky, elderly divorcees from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, known for their turtlenecks, misinformed beliefs, and tendency to say “Oh, hello” in unison. What started as a sketch became a hot-ticket play (Oh, Hello on Broadway) known for surprise celebrity guests, who are invariably treated to too much tuna (we won’t explain, as it’s now a special on Netflix, bless the comedy gods). Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times notably compared it to Mamet’s septuagenarian-stocked China Doll, which ran concurrently. “Oh, Hello is a hoot. Even Pulitzer Prize-winning pros like Mr. Mamet might pick up some tips from Mr. Faizon and Mr. St. Geegland’s hilariously self-aware — and silkily clumsy — use of classic theatrical devices. Though they are summoned into being with blatantly artificial silver wigs and wrinkles that appear to have been drawn with felt-tip pens, Gil and George have their own undeniable and autonomous reality. They are angry, insular, out-of-touch, egregious cultural stereotypes who perceive the rest of the world in similarly stereotypical terms. It turns out that these sour, crotchety guys are best savored in large doses. Mr. Kroll and Mr. Mulaney don’t so much portray Gil and George as allow themselves to be taken over by them…What’s more, they think they’re really funny, which they’re not. Which is exactly what makes them really, really funny.”

So Kroll’s not officially a professor, but he is a sharp, cerebral, artist. And one who also understands that intellect only gets you so far. You don’t inhabit Professor Poopypants or any of his other inventions with such intense glee if you don’t love and understand who they are. He’ll do that next in Big Mouth, a Netflix cartoon series about the ravages of puberty, based on Kroll’s 13-year-old life with best friend Andrew Goldberg. It’s a jump back in time from celebrity codgerhood, but as Kroll points out, while we do change between 13 and 70, it’s the stuff that doesn’t change that’s the funny part. No doubt Kroll will continue to study the funny part, probably until he actually is 70. And why not? A lot of guys do their best work in turtlenecks and cardigans.

In an interview with Maxim last year, Tom Papa recalled his struggling post-college years. “I lived in a New York apartment with two other guys on futons and old mattresses, and there was no sink in the bathroom so we had to brush our teeth in the kitchen sink. There was an occasional roach problem, and we were on the first floor with windows that faced the garbage.”

Of course, it was the happiest he’d ever been. As an 11-year-old, Papa heard some Steve Martin and George Carlin comedy albums and had a miraculous revelation: Grown men could make people laugh and get paid for it. That was all he needed to know, though he graduated New Jersey’s Rider University anyway. Shortly thereafter he was in the city, hustling for open mic spots and shows wherever he could get them. Consequently, he wasn’t home watching a lot of Seinfeld. Which was probably why he wasn’t too nervous when Seinfeld himself walked into Stand Up NY while Papa was performing. (“Oh yeah, Jerry has that show,” he recalls thinking, when someone pointed him out.) Well, Seinfeld thought he was pretty funny and asked Papa to open for him on tour. There are breaks, and then there are Breaks.

Maybe Seinfeld was seeking an act with potential marketing legs as the Tom and Jerry Show. More likely, he recognized a kindred comic spirit. Papa specializes in wry observations of the everyday. As one description of his 2013 comedy special Freaked Out put it, “Tom Papa tackles the hazards of churches, loose change, old age, make-up, raising women, Chinese grocery stores, and magical gnomes.”

Obviously, Papa’s a guy with a lot to say, and his now-fast tracked career gave him plenty of opportunities to say it: His one-man show Only Human opened to raves at Montreal’s noted Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, and his debut comedy album Calm, Cool & Collected was equally praised. And his one-hour Tom Papa Live in New York City is one of the few (if not the only) comedy specials directed by Rob Zombie.

Pretty soon he got his own show, Come to Papa, which ran for just four episodes, but which he’s managed to reformat as a SiriusXM radio show (guests include a firmament of comedians like Mel Brooks, Ray Romano, Dick Cavett, Carl Reiner and that Seinfeld guy) as well as a hit live show in the style of Prairie Home Companion. He also hosted The Marriage Ref for two seasons. (The show arbitrated the squabbles of real-life couples; critics didn’t love it, but it did cause many to wonder if maybe Dr. Phil couldn’t benefit from a few standup classes.) All of these gigs showcased Papa’s knack for seamless transitions between host and main act, often in the same show.

He also made regular appearances on Cinemax’s The Knick, and has scored several big screen roles, most notably in The Informant! and Behind the Candelabra. Steven Soderbergh wasn’t looking for funny guys who could play funny characters; he was looking for guys who could play characters that felt a little off center, and keep the audience feeling that way. Watching Papa in those films, you realize he can wink at the camera without batting an eye.

If there’s anything Papa doesn’t do, it’s dark, tortured, misanthropic comedy riddled with drug references and lewd misogyny. Nor is he trying to be particularly slick or hip. “Comedy isn’t supposed to be cool. It’s supposed to be funny.” If you’re not going to rely on our world’s ready supply of the crass and churlish, you have to work harder. “I want my thing to be better. I want it to just be a good, classy piece of art,” he told Chicago Now. “Some guys can use that stuff and make it that way; that’s not me. That’s not what I’m about, so it’s not really about trying to keep an image, but about trying to make this act as special, and potent, and as funny as I possibly can. From the way I work and the way I am, limiting it with all that language and copping out, it just becomes average. I want it to be better than that.” His wife and daughters probably appreciate the effort, too.

That’s not to say he’s not irreverent, or a 49-year-old naïf. It just means he finds enough fodder in the anxieties, disappointments and small contentments of everyday life that he doesn’t need to dirty them up to make them funny or relatable. On his latest special, Human Mule: “The culture creates this feeling that we should all be incredibly happy and beautiful all the time—that there should be fireworks shooting off your lawn every day. Then if it doesn’t happen, people are miserable, and they break off their marriages, they leave their jobs and they feel depressed. No, that’s not how real life works.”

No, it does not. But if you’re lucky, you’ll at least get to work at something you like to do. And if you’re wise, you’ll feel grateful to do it. And if it doesn’t work out every time? “The cool thing about being a comedian is that a month after NBC canceled Come to Papa, I walked through the same doors to do a set on The Tonight Show. You can’t get rid of a comedian that easily.” Since he’s proved that to be true, we figured we might as well sit around and talk with him for a while.

To understand Alan Tudyk’s love for what he does, look no further than the joy he took in voicing Moana’s Hei-Hei, the dumbest chicken on earth: “The thing for me that really resonated is that when you put a pile of grain in front of him to feed him, he pecks not at the pile of grain, but at the wood plank just next to the pile of grain, happily.”

For a kid whose “stupid ideas” cracked up his friends but barred entry to the theater shows he desperately wanted to be in, Tudyk must be living the dream. For the last two decades, he’s played – and voiced – some of the most antic, idiotic, self-involved, and just plain naïve jackasses known to the big and small screen, and done so with more variety and inventiveness than just about anyone. The A.V. Club doesn’t cite just anyone for “peerless buffoonery.”

And for that, he went to Juilliard? Well, yeah. He studied at Lon Morris College in Texas, where he won the Academic Excellence award for drama.  He did summer stock and then entered Juilliard, where he found that a lot of the drama seemed to happen off stage, with the personal issues that seemed to plague many of his fellow students. Most of what happened on stage was drama, too. He left, seeking more comedic pastures.

He got his first film role in 1997’s 35 miles from Normal, his first TV role in 2000’s Strangers with Candy, and has rarely stopped working since, racking up hundreds of credits – even more when you consider that in most of his animated work, he’s played multiple characters. In fact, he’s voiced roles in every Walt Disney Animation Studios film to date, starting with King Candy in Wreck-It Ralph, for which he won the Annie Award for Voice Acting. On screen, he’s probably best known for playing “Wash” Washburne in the space western television series Firefly, Alpha in the science fiction series Dollhouse and Tucker McGee in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. He’s made off with virtually every scene he’s ever entered in supporting roles like Steve the Pirate in DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Wat in A Knight’s Tale, Gerhart the gay, drug-addled German in 28 Days, and most spectacularly, as the straightlaced Simon who goes from stoner bliss to cokehead paranoia to clothes-shedding madness in a case of mistaken pharmaceutical identity. Oh yeah, and he’s also really good at motion-capture robots, first as Sonny in I, Robot, and last year as K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. And that’s not even touching on the stage work that started it all. From The New York Times 1997 review of Bunny Bunny: “Alan Tudyk is a smashing young actor who gets to show off his impressive comic range in 25 minuscule and entirely memorable roles, from a dizzy Sikh cab driver to a jilted Detroit housewife.”

Since that’s just the tip of a career iceberg unexplorable in a few paragraphs, maybe it’s best to call out the projects that represent not only some of his best work, but a slow deterioration of Hollywood’s sci-fi ghetto. Tudyk is part of a talented group of artists gradually legitimizing the genre with a smart, funny approach that’s broadening its appeal.  It goes back to Firefly, Joss Whedon’s short-lived space Western, in which he played ‘Wash’ Washburne, the pilot of the ship Serenity. Wash’s joke-in-the-face-of-danger resilience made him a fan favorite. The show’s small but loyal audience of sci-fi geeks turned out in droves to see him reprise it in Serenity, its big screen spinoff. As a result, Tudyk found himself spending a whole lot of time at sci-fi conventions, immersed in the odd feverish scene he found both disconcerting and affirming.

And rich in comedic potential. He began writing Con Man, a short-form web series in which he stars as Wray Nerely, an actor who finds himself pigeonholed after starring in a hit sci-fi series, and not dealing at all well with his ensuing lack of success. Tudyk’s biggest concern was how well sci-fi fans would deal with a comedy that mocked the genre. They took it pretty well. The series broke crowd-funding records when it launched on Indiegogo in 2015, with 46,000 people contributing $3.2 million. The SyFy Channel picked it up, and it subsequently received an Emmy nod – a nice tip of the hat, courtesy of the Establishment.

Watching Tudyk’s character stare in hallucinogenic fascination at his own gargantuan hands in Death at a Funeral, they seem to grow before our eyes as well. In Moana, we feel the full range of his rooster emotions, despite the fact they’re expressed solely in clucks. Such characters – often not more than outlines in most scripts – require more of an artist than we realize. Tudyk supplies a depth of imagination that not only fills in the blanks, but renders them in clear, rainbow Technicolor.  We need to see Tudyk in more lead roles. And if the Establishment is smart, we will.

After decades of making films about people in search of, finding and then re-examining their identities and place in the world, Jay Duplass is doing some reevaluation of his own. Fifty percent of a filmmaking duo with his brother Mark, Jay was the half that stayed largely behind the camera, writing and directing films – The Puffy Chair, Cyrus, Jeff, Who Lives at Home – that made them indie stars and eventually, benevolent overlord-enablers of many of the young filmmakers they’ve inspired. Now, Duplass finds himself a bona-fide Critics’ Choice-ified actor, courtesy of the persistent Jill Soloway.

Duplass is the kind of guy who’s always ready to help out a fellow creator, so when Soloway was having trouble casting the role of Transparent’s man-child Josh Pfefferman, he was happy to suggest a number of names for the part. Instead, Soloway became convinced Jay Duplass was the name she wanted. And these days, no smart person in the business holds out on Jill Soloway for long. In its review of “Amazon’s first great series,” Slate wrote, “Perfectly played by Duplass, Josh has any number of wonderful qualities: He’s funny, he’s dirty, he’s sweet, he has a sort of adorable, bumbling, apologetic Hugh Grant by way of shaggy hipster Los Angeles vibe, and, most of all, he’s interested in interesting women—whom he essentially collects, not through any deliberate maliciousness, but out of a kind of perpetual need.”

If Duplass had his doubts in the beginning, it was nevertheless his nature to be open to the idea. “I just firmly believe that when you’re making a piece of art, embracing the unknown is the biggest part of it…and being an actor is weirdly natural for me to live in that space.”

If you choose a career in independent film, you’re pretty much guaranteed permanent residence in that space. In 2003, that meant being a 30-year-old University of Texas film MFA living on $17,000 a year while peers seemed to be passing him by. “I had gone to a Catholic prep school where everyone was rich and having kids by the time they were 30. But [Mark and I] never got jobs,” he said in a recent interview. “We decided to just keep moving our art forward, because we believed from the beginning, and I still believe, that you don’t get to be a director by rising up through the PA ranks. You get to be an assistant director by rising through the PA ranks.”

That year, desperate after a series of early failures to define themselves as filmmakers, Jay and Mark made their three-dollar, hail-Mary short This Is John, submitted it to Sundance, and suddenly found themselves indie film darlings, a title that comes with buzz, if not a lot of cash. The upside? “When you don’t have any money and no one believes in you, and you have nothing, you just do it all,” Duplass told a group of film students this year. That established the scrappy, distinctive aesthetic that became a Duplass Brothers trademark. It also created a loose, collaborative and improvisational on-set environment that became a recruiting vehicle for A-list actors looking for an artistic experience they rarely found on big Hollywood movies. Which in turn recruited big Hollywood interest in Jay and Mark Duplass. So once people do believe in you and you have money, what do you do?

Pretty much what you’ve always done: tell stories that reflect your endless fascination with humans and the confused, funny, mundane, lonely and profound moments that comprise our everyday lives. Duplass’ genius as a writer and director is helping us recognize and appreciate them as such. “[Mark and I] are able to laugh at ourselves in our most desperate moments. We weren’t necessarily able to do it in public, but as it turns out, we were able to do it on film and it turned out that’s what people want us to do.” People, HBO, Netflix, et cetera.

Those human stories – particularly of familial bonds in all their destructive and redemptive glory– are ones he’s now telling as an actor, not just in Transparent, but also to widely praised films like Landline, Outside In, Beatriz at Dinner, and Manson Family Vacation, which he both executive produced and starred in. Duplass plays one of two brothers on a dubious road trip, and was widely praised for his chemistry with co-star Linas Phillips. One would hope so. If he can’t play the role of a brother, you’d have to wonder what he’s been doing for the past four decades of his life and career. “Before shooting, we talked a lot about the complexity of being brothers, and how they push your buttons, yet also know you better than your wife does. It can piss me off, but at the same time, you know how to make your brother laugh more than anyone.”

So now what? The Emmy-magnet Transparent coincided with writing and directing the HBO series Togetherness, as well as a string of exec-produced projects including The Overnight, 6 Years and 2015’s acclaimed Tangerine. He and Mark have a four-picture deal with Netflix, a partnership with creative agency Donut, and their HBO series Room 104 premieres in late July. The stress of an absurd schedule doesn’t seem to be his biggest dilemma; on the contrary, it seems to be creative fuel. The dilemma, as its always been for Duplass, remains an existential one. During the last season of Transparent, he mused to IndieWire “I still am reckoning with acting and having a weird experience in midlife where I’m kind of changing careers and wondering if maybe this is not only what I like more, but am better at?” To which we say, since when is this Sophie’s Choice? As a compulsive and gifted storyteller, it’s his privilege to do both. And in our humble, Duplass-fan opinion, a creative obligation.

Mike White is less pretentious now than he was in grade school. Back then, he read – or at least carried around – Sam Shepard’s Buried Child and insisted his parents buy him a recorded version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He’s harbored ambitions to be a writer since the age of eight, looking for answers to life in films like Shoot the Moon, Wetherby and Kramer vs. Kramer. Given White’s self-selected syllabus, it’s not surprising his boyhood oeuvre comprised people discussing scandalous affairs over cocktails. He’s softened since then, but biting satire still makes a cameo in much of his work. As one review of The Good Girl pointed out, White “flirts with a happy ending, but it’s only a tease. There’s still blood dripping from the smiley face.” It won White Best Screenplay at the Independent Film Awards, and Jennifer Aniston her best role to date.

White grew up Pasadena, California, a town he’d later render in surprisingly dark, smart tones in a short-lived nighttime soap of the same name. He left for Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he loved the experience and hated the weather. He returned west after graduating and got a job as a writer and producer on Dawson’s Creek and then Freaks and Geeks, a show that seemed tailor made for someone with White’s abiding love for oddballs, but he found the writer’s room a bit crowded for his taste. He started writing solo, and within a year delivered Chuck & Buck, his 2000 breakout. The New York Times called it “a strange, intense and moving film about friendship and loss, an antidote to the current epidemic of lazy nostalgia for the innocence of childhood and therefore, magically, one of the few truly grown-up movies you’re likely to see this year.” It was also White’s acting breakout (playing Buck), which the Times gave equal praise: ”Chuck & Buck as a whole exhibits the quiet sensitivity and quicksilver intelligence that infuses Mr. White’s performance.”

Chuck & Buck also exhibits another White trademark – his oddballs are not the pre-packaged loveable, goofy misfits we’re served in most comedies. Yes, they can be winning, caring and silly, but also petty, self-righteous and sometimes, straight-up creepy. His Buck is one such anti-hero; one of his best female versions is Peggy, the secretary brilliantly played by Molly Shannon in his 2007 self-penned directorial debut Year of the Dog, his third IFA Best Screenplay nomination. His best creations are born of his instinct to tread warily in a business that gives us too much of what we think we want. “There is some need to flatter the human race with the movies that we make. And if they’re not flattering, they are villains, they’re not us. And there is a part of me that thinks, ‘No, you’re that person, too.’”

The balance between comedy and the darkness that often fuels it, between cynicism and belief, is one White’s a master at striking. That deft observation is on display in the sociopolitical allegory Beatriz at Dinner; and in Brad’s Status, his exploration of comparative anxiety, which he also directed. You even see it in his screenplays, featuring his bombastic buddy Jack Black, like Orange County, School of Rock and Nacho Libre.

White’s other gift –offering up counter perspectives without becoming preachy – made HBO’s Enlightened one of the most original and acclaimed shows on television. It starred Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate executive who has a spiritual awakening following a major workplace meltdown. (In an irony even second-grade White would’ve considered over the top, inspiration came from his own meltdown while working on a failed show called Cracking Up.) In Amy, White gave us one of the most complex, funny and all-too-rare female leads on TV. New Republic called her “…terrible in her selfishness, in her social tone-deafness,” but also recognized her quixotic efforts to better herself and society. She’s “ridiculous, naive, but fundamentally a force for good.” As with so many groundbreaking shows, Enlightened was viewed in inverse proportion to its critical praise, but White’s okay with that. He’d rather be on the fringe of mass entertainment if it means telling original stories about quirky, misguided people who sometimes try a little too hard.

If there’s a theme to be found in White’s work, perhaps it’s our lifelong, delusional search for better, more idealized versions of ourselves. The struggle to keep who we are in line with how we want people to see us. To do good, to mess up, to start over. Why does that resonate? Because it’s truthful, relatable, hysterical, and also kind of noble.