Eric Lange is a character actor who disappears into big, soft, trusting men and makes their blindness hurt. His Lyle Mitchell in Escape at Dannemora is the reason to know his name; most of the rest is steady, well-judged ensemble work.
Fi1m perspective
In Escape at Dannemora (2018) Eric Lange plays Lyle Mitchell, who works at the prison alongside his wife Tilly, drives her in every morning, buys what she asks for and believes what she tells him. Lange gives him no flicker of suspicion. He is a big soft man who thinks his marriage is fine, and the performance works because he never once lets on that he knows what we know. We winced each time he was kind to her, because we could see what she did with her afternoons and he could not, and the wincing was the point.
He had been doing this sort of thing, mostly unnoticed, for a long while before anyone looked. A film debut in High School High (1996) after a theatre degree, then years of Los Angeles stage work and guest television, a recurring part on Lost (2009), a stretch on Victorious (2010–13), and then The Bridge (2013), which is where people began to put the name to the face. Since then the parts have grown without becoming leads: a CIA station chief in Narcos (2016–17), Detective Gene Holcomb in Perry Mason (2020–23), Brand New Cherry Flavor (2021), Sugar (2024). On film he turns up in Nightcrawler (2014) and Wind River (2017), and he made his Broadway debut in The Country House (2014).
His method, when the part allows it, is to change the body. For Lyle he gained a good deal of weight and wore prosthetic teeth, and he has said of Dannemora that "it was such a transformation that I wasn't Eric in any sense." That kind of talk usually announces a performance that is all latex and no person. Here it did not. Ben Stiller's series is a good two hours too long, and Lange's scenes are the ones we would not have cut, because the make-up is doing nothing the acting has not already done. Patricia Arquette's Tilly has the showier part; Lange makes us look at the man she is lying to.
The limit is that most parts do not allow it. In Perry Mason his Holcomb is one of two faces of a city that would rather the case went away, and he does it well, but that is about all the handsome, slow series gives him room to be. Put him in a suit in a crime drama and he is a reliable presence, which is the polite phrase for an actor the show has not thought hard about.
Character actors of his kind tend to get one part that shows what they are for and then a long run of being dependably good in other people's programmes. Lyle Mitchell is that part. Watch Escape at Dannemora for it, and be patient through the middle episodes.
Biography
Eric Lange is an American actor. He was born on 19 February 1973 in Hamilton, Ohio, and graduated with a BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Lange has appeared in numerous television series, including recurring roles as Stuart Radzinsky in Lost (2009) and Erwin Sikowitz in Victorious (2010–2013). He played Bill Stechner in Narcos (2016–2017) and Lyle Mitchell in the miniseries Escape at Dannemora (2018), for which he received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination. From 2020 to 2022 he portrayed Detective Gene Holcomb in the HBO series Perry Mason. His film credits include Nightcrawler (2014), Wind River (2017) and Day Shift (2022).
