Jack Quaid

Watch Jack Quaid stand still. In The Boys (2019) his Hughie Campbell is a man who apologises to furniture, and the apology starts in the shoulders before it reaches the mouth. In Companion (2025) his Josh is whining and reasonable and wounded in the same breath, a man who has called himself a nice guy so often that he no longer hears the words. They are the same figure seen from either side: an ordinary man who needs everyone around him to agree he is decent. Hughie needs it because he is frightened. Josh needs it because he thinks he is owed.

It took the career a while to find him. He was Marvel in The Hunger Games (2012), a small part, then smaller ones in Vinyl (2016) and Logan Lucky (2017). Eric Kripke's The Boys gave him the lead in 2019 and has kept him in it, with Erin Moriarty alongside him for the whole run. Around it he has done a great deal of voice work, Brad Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020–2024) above all, and taken supporting parts in Scream (2022) and, as Richard Feynman, in Oppenheimer (2023). Then 2025 handed him two leads at once, Companion and Novocaine.

What works is the comedy of grievance. The funniest lines in Companion are Josh's complaints about how hard all this is for him, and Quaid says them as though he expects sympathy and is hurt not to get it. We laughed at him a great deal, and then, somewhere past the hour, we found we were waiting for him to do something new, because the film had made its point about Josh four or five times and given the actor nothing further to play. That is the risk of being this easy to read. Directors see that we understand the man at once, so they write him thin and let Quaid fill the gaps.

The Boys has the opposite problem. Hughie is the way in, and the show needs him small so that Antony Starr's Homelander and Karl Urban's Butcher can loom; Urban gets most of the good lines and knows it, and Quaid spends long stretches holding the reaction shot. Quaid has said that "Playing the villain is really fun, because you’re unburdened by the idea of ‘likability.’" Josh bears that out. But likability was never his subject. Wanting to be liked is, and he plays it with more care than the material usually gives back.

The voice work is not a sideline. Boimler ran four seasons, and comedy in a recording booth is a good school for an actor whose main instrument is embarrassment. Whether the body can carry a whole film is the question Novocaine (2025) puts to him, and it is worth watching him answer it. If a director ever gives him a man who does not care in the least whether we like him, we would like to see what he does with the quiet.