Dan Fogler

Somewhere in the middle of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), a film that keeps stopping to check its own family trees, a baker asks a woman not to leave. Dan Fogler plays it at kitchen volume, and for a minute the film is about two people rather than a franchise. It moved us, and it surprised us that it did, because nothing around the scene had earned it. Fogler had, on his own, by talking to Alison Sudol as though the cameras were in another building.

That is the job he has mostly been given. He started in theatre, originating William Barfée in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (off-Broadway in 2004, Broadway in 2005), and went into studio comedy as the lead in Good Luck Chuck (2007) and Balls of Fury (2007), neither of which was well liked and neither of which we have reviewed. He has cited Chaplin and Abbott and Costello, and you can see them in the way he uses his body: the double take, the stumble held a beat longer than it needs to be, the man walking into a room he plainly should not be in. He has also done voice work in animation.

The part that made him was Jacob Kowalski, the No-Maj baker of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), played across three films for David Yates. Kowalski is the audience surrogate, the one who reacts to the creatures so that we do not have to, and Fogler's timing is what keeps the reaction from becoming a routine. He looks, he takes it in, and then he decides to be delighted. The warmth is real. The trouble is the films. By The Crimes of Grindelwald the plot cares more about its genealogies than its people, and Fogler and Sudol are left to carry what feeling there is, which they do, in a corner, while the story looks the other way.

Lately he has been trusted with real people. He played Francis Ford Coppola in The Offer (2022), which we have not reviewed, and Albert Grossman in James Mangold's A Complete Unknown (2024), where our review did not single him out. In a film built around the man at the microphone, that is close to a compliment. The supporting cast is there to be looked past, and he let himself be looked past.

Nobody has yet made the film that puts him at the centre and takes him seriously there. Until someone does, the advice is to watch the edges of the frame, and to stay for the kitchen.