Billy Magnussen is the handsome man you are meant to distrust: the prince, the boyfriend, the henchman, played with a stretched grin and a visible need to be liked. Films have used him for a scene or two; the better parts have come on television.
Fi1m perspective
Billy Magnussen has a face that films do not trust. It is a large, square, handsome face, and he plays it as if he knows the effect it has and is not sure he deserves it: the jaw set, the eyes anxious, the grin arriving a beat early. He stretches it for comedy and holds it stiff for menace, and either way the man underneath is asking to be liked. He has said as much himself: "I’m not scared of playing the villain. My face is the villain. I didn’t get to choose it."
He came up through a daytime soap, As the World Turns, from 2008 to 2010, and then the stage, where he originated Spike in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike in 2012. Into the Woods (2014) put him in a prince's boots as Rapunzel's Prince, and for most of a decade afterwards he was the film industry's reliable prince, boyfriend and henchman: Bridge of Spies (2015), Game Night (2018), Aladdin (2019), No Time to Die (2021). Television gave him more to do, as Byron Gogol in Made for Love (2021), and the mid-2020s have brought bigger parts, in Road House (2024), Lilo & Stitch (2025) and the series The Audacity (2026).
Our own reviews have caught him mostly at the edges, which is where the films put him. In Bridge of Spies his junior lawyer, Doug Forrester, is there to be told things, and Spielberg tells him a good many. In No Time to Die we did not find room to mention Logan Ash at all, which in a 163-minute film says something about the part rather than the actor. Lilo & Stitch is the one where he gets a proper go, as the alien Pleakley in human disguise, and we were glad of him: Zach Galifianakis seemed to have been asked to play Jumba rather than be funny as him, and Magnussen, in a bad shirt on a beach, was the one of the pair who behaved as though the joke was worth making.
The complaint about him is fair and he knows it. He is cast for the hunk and the creep, and the parts lean on his body and his grin rather than on anything he might do with a whole story. Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed No Time to Die, has used him twice, and what directors keep coming back for is the willingness: he will look ridiculous, and he will let you see the fear under the swagger. Critics who have followed him on television say he finds something human in men built to be disliked. Nothing in the films we have seen contradicts that, and none of them gave him enough to prove it either.
Films have been using the face. Television has started asking what is behind it. We would like a film to ask.
Biography
Billy Magnussen is an American actor. He trained at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and made his Broadway debut in The Ritz (2007). He received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2013).
Magnussen has appeared in films including Into the Woods (2014), Bridge of Spies (2015), The Big Short (2015), Game Night (2018), Aladdin (2019), No Time to Die (2021) and Road House (2024). He played Pleakley in the live-action Lilo & Stitch (2025). His television work includes roles in Black Mirror (2011) and Made for Love (2021).
