A supporting actor who did his best work in the pauses. As Peter Gregory in Silicon Valley he made silence the funniest thing on television for one season; before that he spent a career being briefly and exactly right in other people's films.
Fi1m perspective
Peter Gregory is asked a question and does not answer it. He looks past the young men in front of him, his mouth moves slightly, and they begin to wonder what they have said wrong. Then he speaks, slowly, as though each word were being billed. Christopher Evan Welch built a billionaire out of these pauses in the first season of Silicon Valley (2014), and the joke is that Gregory is thinking, at speed, about something none of us can follow. We laughed every time, and it took us a while to notice how few lines the man had been given.
It was his last role, and it is the one to start with. He came to it after a career spent in other people's ensembles. He trained in Dallas and Seattle, started on stage in Seattle, and moved to New York in 1997, where he worked with Ivo van Hove on A Streetcar Named Desire (1999) and alongside Bill Irwin in Scapin. Film and television followed from the late 1990s, mostly in small parts: a pastor with a funeral monologue in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), the sceptic who keeps interrupting Philip Seymour Hoffman at a party in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012), a clerk reading out the roll of names during the vote in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012). His one longer television job was Rubicon (2010), which did not last. None of these was a lead. That is the only reservation anyone has raised about him, and it is not much of one.
He worked three times with Woody Allen, and the part most people know is the voice in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Welch narrates the whole film in a flat, faintly amused tone, and we found the narration irritating, because Allen uses it to tell us what Rebecca Hall has just shown us and to skip the conversations he did not want to write. The fault is the writing. The voice is good: dry, level, never pushing, and it holds the film together without once asking to be noticed. Given better sentences it would have been a pleasure.
What he played, on stage and on screen, were men standing slightly to one side of everyone else: pedantic, awkward, certain about things nobody else cared about. Gregory is the fullest version. Welch died in December 2013, before the season aired, and Suzanne Cryer's Laurie Bream took over his firm. She is odder, as we said in our review, but she is odd out loud. Watch the first season and count his lines. It will not take long, and you will remember most of them.
Biography
Christopher Evan Welch was an American actor known for roles in film, television and theatre. He was born on 28 September 1965 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and died on 2 December 2013 in Santa Monica, California, from complications of lung cancer.
Welch trained at the University of Dallas and the University of Washington, and began his career in regional theatre before moving to New York. He appeared in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions including Festen, The Crucible and A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he received an Obie Award. On screen he played the narrator in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), a clerk in Lincoln (2012) and John More in The Master (2012). His final role was as the eccentric investor Peter Gregory in the first season of the HBO series Silicon Valley (2014).
