Arturo Castro

Watch Jaime, Ilana's flatmate in Broad City, tell her off. He does it in the tone of someone offering a second helping, and Ilana sails on regardless, and it is an episode later that she realises she has been told something. Castro plays a whole character in that gap. The flat is chaos and he is the person who quietly puts the chaos back, and the joke is never that he is a pushover; it is that he is right and in no hurry to be seen to be. We laughed hardest at how long the penny took to drop, and it was always his timing rather than the line that did it.

He came to it sideways. Castro hosted Conexión on Guatemala's national network before moving to New York somewhere between 2005 and 2008 and training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he met Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. When they made Broad City (2014), Jaime was the part they wrote him, and he played it for the programme's whole run to 2019. In the middle of that he was also David Rodríguez in Narcos (2017), a dramatic part in a series about cartels, which is roughly the opposite job. "I don't want to play a cartoon," he said of Jaime, and it reads as a rule for the career.

The rule produced Alternatino with Arturo Castro (2019), his own sketch series about modern Latino life, which is the plainest statement of what he is for: the parts he was not being offered, written by him. The films are a different story. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2016), The Menu (2022) and Road House (2024) put him in ensembles where a soft-spoken man is easily lost, and then TRON: Ares (2025) cast him as Seth Flores in a film we scored 50. We found more to say about Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score than about anyone in the cast, and Castro is in the film and then he is not. That is the film's doing, but it is also the risk of his method, which needs a room small enough for the quiet to register.

So the recommendation is the obvious one: the first three seasons of Broad City, where the writing trusts him to be the still point and he repays it. He has another film in post-production as we write. We would rather someone gave him another flat and a friend who never listens.