Debi Mazar

The voice gets there first. Debi Mazar talks fast and flat, in the vowels of Queens, and she starts most of her lines before the other person has finished theirs. She plays women who have made up their minds about you: publicists, assistants, small-time villains, the friend who says the thing the heroine does not want to hear. It is a narrow trade, and she has worked it for more than thirty years without, as far as we can see, ever doing it badly.

The type comes from somewhere. Before she acted, Mazar worked the doors at the Mudd Club and Danceteria in New York at the turn of the 1980s, and did make-up and hair, including for Andy Warhol and for Madonna's videos. That is training of a kind: the door person is the one who decides, and the make-up artist sees people before they are ready to be seen. Her first substantial film part was Sandy in Goodfellas (1990), got, by her own account, on a résumé she invented: "I made up a fake one because this was pre-IMDb and they couldn't check your stuff." Spike Lee cast her twice, including as Peg in Malcolm X (1992); she was Spice in Batman Forever (1995); television gave her early leads in Civil Wars (1991–1993) and L.A. Law.

The two of her titles we have reviewed show the two ends of the work. In The Insider (1999) she is Debbie De Luca, one face in Michael Mann's crowd of producers and lawyers, and our review does not single her out, which is not a complaint. Mann's film needs people who look as though they have sat in that office for years, and she does. Entourage (2004) is the other end: eight seasons as Shauna Roberts, Vince's publicist, brought in whenever the boys have done something she now has to explain to the press. We found the series easy company that never grew, with one great character in Ari Gold and three amiable ones, and Shauna is none of the four. Yet we kept waiting for her, because she is the one person in that world paid to say no and meaning it, and Mazar delivers each no as though she has said it a hundred times and is tired of nobody listening. It is the closest the show comes to an adult.

The complaint, such as it is, is that nobody has widened the frame. Younger (2015–2021) gave her a starring part at last, as Maggie Amato; we have not reviewed it, so we will only say that it ran for six years. Elsewhere the parts have stayed the size they were in 1990. That is partly the industry and partly the type: a woman who is always sure of herself is useful for two scenes and, writers seem to think, tiring for ninety minutes. We doubt it. Someone should hand her a whole film. She has been minding other people's doors for long enough.