Kevin Dillon

Watch Kevin Dillon walk into a room as Johnny Drama and you can see him rehearsing the entrance. The chest goes out, the voice drops to a register it cannot hold, and somewhere behind the eyes a man is checking whether it worked. It has not, and he knows before we do. That gap, between the performance a character is giving and the one everybody else can see, is where Dillon works, and he has been working it since the 1980s.

He arrived early. A television film in 1983, a first sizeable part in Heaven Help Us (1985), then Bunny in Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), the soldier who has fallen in love with his own gun. Stone used the New York accent and the flinty face for menace, and Dillon made Bunny frightening because he is so plainly enjoying himself; we found him harder to watch than the men doing worse things more quietly. Stone brought him back as the drummer John Densmore in The Doors (1991), and around that there was a lead in the 1988 remake of The Blob, then No Escape (1994) and a run of parts that did not get much notice. The character actor's lot: steady work, few reviews.

Then Doug Ellin gave him Johnny Drama and, for eight seasons of Entourage (2004–2011) and a film in 2015, Dillon had the part his whole career had been preparing him for. Asked whether it was written for him, he said, "No, I auditioned." Drama is the older half-brother whose career has already happened, an actor who treats every breakfast as a callback, and it would be easy to play him as a punchline. Dillon does not. The bluster is funny, and under it there is real sadness, a man who knows everyone stopped listening some years ago and cannot stop talking anyway. We thought the show never grew; Drama was the one character it did not need to grow, because Dillon had built the whole man by the end of the first season.

The limit is that this is one man, seen from two sides. Hard Dillon and soft Dillon share the same posture, and directors have mostly asked for one or the other rather than both at once, which is why Bunny and Drama sit twenty years apart with not much between them. The lead in The Blob did not turn him into a leading man, and nothing since has tried again.

What he does, he does properly, and two directors saw it: Stone, who wanted the threat, and Ellin, who wanted the insecurity and got the threat thrown in. If you know him only from Entourage, go back to Platoon and watch Bunny grin. It is the same grin.