Jacob Pitts is the man at the edge of the frame with the driest line in the scene. On Justified he made a deputy marshal out of not much and was given less than he earned; elsewhere he has barely been used at all.
Fi1m perspective
On Justified, when Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder are talking, everyone else in the marshals' office is waiting for them to finish. Tim Gutterson is the one who ends the wait. Pitts plays him flat and still, the face doing almost nothing, so the joke arrives a beat after the words and you are not always sure he meant it. It is the kind of part that turns into furniture over a long run, and across six seasons he made sure it did not.
The career is a character actor's. Guest television from 1999, then two early films, EuroTrip (2004) as Cooper Harris and 21 (2008) as Fisher, neither of which asked much of him. Then 2010, and two parts at once: PFC Bill 'Hoosier' Smith in The Pacific, five episodes, and Gutterson in Justified, seventy-eight episodes between 2010 and 2015. The second came out of the first, and the part was built around him. "He was written for me. I didn't go in to audition. It was a straight-up offer." Since then it has been guest and recurring roles, usually a uniform or a badge, usually the man with the wry remark.
What works is the stillness beside a stiller man. Timothy Olyphant plays Raylan under a hat with his hands at rest, and an actor standing next to that has two choices: move, or find another kind of quiet. Pitts found one, drier and less pleased with itself. Graham Yost's writers took his suggestions for dialogue and backstory and put them in the scripts, which tells you the character was partly his idea of the character. Our review said he and Erica Tazel got a fraction of the lines their faces deserved, and we stand by it. Watching him sit through another Raylan and Boyd scene with a look that said he had heard it before, we were irritated on his behalf, because he plainly could have carried more.
The Pacific is the honest caveat. For three episodes we struggled to tell the Marines apart, and he was among the ones we could not pick out; the series gets better and so, we assume, does he, but we cannot say we noticed. The larger caveat is that nobody has yet given him a lead, so we do not know what he does with a room of his own. See Justified for Olyphant and Goggins. You will notice Pitts anyway, which is rather the point, and somebody should act on it.
Biography
Jacob Pitts is an American actor. Born on 20 November 1979 in Weston, Connecticut, he began his career with a television debut in 1999 and appeared on the New York stage in a 2000 production of Macbeth.
Pitts is known for his role as Cooper Harris in the film EuroTrip (2004), as PFC Bill 'Hoosier' Smith in the miniseries The Pacific (2010), and as Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Gutterson in the FX series Justified (2010–2015). He has also appeared in 21 (2008), Sex and the City, Law & Order, and other television series.
