Ken Marino plays men who want something too badly and cannot hide it, and he plays them with his whole body. Ron Donald in Party Down is the best of them, and nothing since has given him as much room.
Fi1m perspective
A client frowns. Ron Donald, who runs the catering crew in Party Down (2009), sees it, and the panic arrives all at once: the sweat, the pleading, the voice of some manager he once worked under and has never shaken. Ken Marino holds the look a beat past the point where it is funny, so that for a second we are watching a frightened man, and then it is funnier than it was. He has been doing some version of this for thirty years.
He came out of sketch. The State (1993–1995), the MTV series he co-created and performed in, gave him a troupe he has never really left. David Wain, from the same group, has directed him five times, in Wet Hot American Summer (2001) and Role Models (2008) among them, and Marino co-wrote Role Models. A recurring part as Vinnie Van Lowe in Veronica Mars kept him busy in the years between. Then Party Down, 2009 to 2010 with a return in 2023, in which he also directed, including the second season's finale. Since then the parts have been showbiz creeps and men in suits: Streeter Peters in The Other Two (2019), Harry Hollinger in The Residence (2025).
What he does that most comic actors do not is take the stupid thing seriously. Where another actor would signal that he knows the joke, Marino plays it straight down the middle, and the Strasberg training shows in how completely he believes Ron's five-year plan, which ends in a Soup 'R Crackers franchise. We laughed at that plan and then, somewhere in the first season, stopped laughing, because Marino plays it as the only thing keeping the man upright, and the show is honest enough to let us see that. Michael J. Pepin's unflattering fluorescent light helps; nobody in Party Down looks better than they are, and Marino least of all.
The limit is that everyone now knows what he is for. Casting directors want the arrogant man about to be humiliated or the desperate man about to be exposed, and he has said himself that it is more fun to play the butt of the joke than the straight man. It is, and he is good at it. But in The Residence, a crowded whodunnit with eight episodes to fill, he is one White House adviser among many, and we did not find much to say about him, which is a first. The role was written to the type and the type did the work.
Ron Donald had wants, a past and a drink problem, and Marino turned all three into comedy without denying any of them. He needs writers who will do that for him again. Failing that, we would like to see someone cast him as the calm one at the table, and find out what he does with the silence.
Biography
Ken Marino is an American actor, comedian, director and screenwriter. Born on 19 December 1968 in West Islip, New York, he studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
He began his career as a cast member on the MTV sketch series The State (1993–1995). Marino has since appeared in films including Wet Hot American Summer (2001), The Ten (2007) and Wanderlust (2012), and in television series such as Party Down (2009–2010), Childrens Hospital (2008–2016) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–2021). He is married to screenwriter Erica Oyama and frequently collaborates with David Wain.
