Chris Klein makes clean-cut athletes worth caring about, and Election is the clearest reason to value him. His sincerity works especially well in a cruel comedy; repeated casting as the nice young man narrowed what he could show.
Fi1m perspective
In Election (1999), Chris Klein's Paul Metzler is guileless enough to make the people around him seem worse without trying. We warmed to Paul because Klein gives his innocence a sincerity that the film's self-deceiving adults cannot manage. It is a good performance in a sharply funny film, and the clearest example of why his familiar casting as the decent athlete can work. Alexander Payne needs someone whose goodness survives the satire, and Klein supplies him without making decency seem like a plea for our approval.
That matters in a school comedy where Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick make cruelty so watchable. Klein does not have to compete with them for nastiness, and the film benefits from having somebody we need not distrust. Payne sometimes presses a joke too hard, a reservation worth keeping even in a film we rate this highly. Klein gives us a reason to care when the comedy gets cruel, because Paul seems so ill-equipped to recognise it. Making him more knowing would spoil the performance; his innocence is what makes him useful to Payne.
American Pie (1999) supplied his breakout role as Chris 'Oz' Ostreicher, another comfortable fit for his sincere charm. He reprised Oz in American Pie 2 (2001) and American Reunion (2012), keeping that early association alive. The limitation was the casting: repeated clean-cut jocks offered fewer chances to complicate the impression. Rollerball (2002) drew poor notices for both film and performance, while the villainous Dusty Dinkleman in Just Friends (2005) gave him a different comic task.
Later television work brought more antagonistic characters, including Orlin Dwyer, also known as Cicada, in The Flash (2018–2019). That recurring villain role is a substantial change from the teen-comedy romantic lead, though a darker part alone is no reason to call a performance better. We would be more interested in seeing another director find a good use for his sincerity than in seeing him discard it altogether. Start with Election, where Payne understands how funny a decent young man can be among people behaving badly.
Biography
Chris Klein is an American actor. He made his screen debut as Paul Metzler in the 1999 film Election, directed by Alexander Payne, after being discovered while still in high school in Omaha, Nebraska. He briefly attended Texas Christian University, where he studied theatre.
Klein is known for his role as Chris 'Oz' Ostreicher in the American Pie film series, appearing in American Pie (1999), American Pie 2 (2001) and American Reunion (2012). Other credits include We Were Soldiers (2002), Rollerball (2002), Just Friends (2005) and television appearances in The Flash and Sweet Magnolias.
