Chris Zylka is mostly cast as the biggest boy in school: the bully, the witch-hunter, the follower. He has had one part worth the name, Tom Garvey in The Leftovers, and the show took a season to find a use for him.
Fi1m perspective
On screen he is usually the obstacle. In The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) he is Flash Thompson, the school bully, and our review does not mention him, which is less a slight than a description of the part: Marc Webb's film spends its best energy on Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, and the boy who torments Peter Parker is there to be large and then to be sorry. That is the shape of most of what Zylka has been asked to do. Physically imposing young men who threaten something, from high-school corridors to cults, with the script telling us what they want before he opens his mouth.
The career runs in two lines that rarely cross. One is teen and genre television: Joey Donner in 10 Things I Hate About You (2009–2010), Jake Armstrong in The Secret Circle (2011–2012), and the horror films around them, Shark Night (2011) and Piranha 3DD (2012), which were noticed only by people who go looking for that sort of thing. The other is odder and more interesting: Thor in Gregg Araki's Kaboom (2010), a lead as Kermit in Dixieland (2015) opposite Riley Keough, Chuck Harris in Novitiate (2017), a run on Dare Me (2019–2020). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. The one place the two lines meet is The Leftovers (2014–2017).
We should be honest about how that went for us. Tom Garvey in the first season is a son off in the desert, in a storyline the show never makes matter, and when we found ourselves bored around the fifth episode, and then annoyed at being bored by something so serious, a fair share of the annoyance was the desert. It was not that Zylka was bad. It was that nobody had yet decided what the part was for. The series becomes as good as television gets from its second year, and the part changes with it, into something more exposed, physically and otherwise, than anything he had been given before. Our praise for those years went to Carrie Coon, and it still does.
He has said his training was the Stanislavski kind, where you "write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away." That is a reasonable way to describe his career so far: a great deal of preparation for roles that asked mainly for his shoulders. Watch The Leftovers for Coon, and keep an eye on Garvey once the show stops leaving him in the sand. Whether there is more to see depends on somebody writing him a door rather than a doorway to stand in.
Biography
Chris Zylka is an American actor and model. Born Christopher Michael Settlemire on 9 May 1985 in Warren, Ohio, he took his mother's maiden name as his professional surname. He studied art at the University of Toledo before moving to Los Angeles at age 19 to pursue acting.
Zylka began his career with guest appearances on television series including 90210 (2008), Hannah Montana and 10 Things I Hate About You. He gained notice for film roles such as Thor in Kaboom (2010), Blake in Shark Night (2011), Kyle in Piranha 3DD (2012) and Flash Thompson in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). On television he played Jake Armstrong in The Secret Circle (2011–2012) and Tom Garvey in The Leftovers (2014–2017).
