Martin Starr

Watch what Martin Starr does while someone else is talking. Nothing. He does not nod, he does not shift in his chair, he does not prepare a face. When his line comes it comes flat and a fraction late, as if he has weighed up whether the other person deserved a reply and decided, on balance, no. In Silicon Valley (2014) he and Kumail Nanjiani's Dinesh sit two feet apart for six years and despise each other, and Starr's half of the feud is the one that never raises its voice.

He was 16 when he was cast as Bill Haverchuck in Freaks and Geeks (1999), the allergic latchkey boy among the geeks. The series lasted one season. What followed was the thin stretch that follows most young actors off cancelled shows, and it nearly finished him: the parts dried up, he fired his agent and thought about quitting. Judd Apatow, who had produced Freaks and Geeks, brought him back with Knocked Up (2007). Party Down (2009) gave him Roman DeBeers, a caterer who thinks of himself as a science fiction writer, and Silicon Valley gave him six seasons as Gilfoyle, the systems architect and Satanist who holds everyone in the house in open contempt.

The two roles we rate most sit at either end of that story, and the same stillness does different work in each. Gilfoyle's flatness is a weapon; Bill's is a wound. We were caught off guard by how much Bill got to us: Starr plays a boy who comes home to an empty house and treats it as ordinary, and the deadpan that makes his adult characters funny makes the child quietly sad. What we noticed in Freaks and Geeks was that the geeks did not all share the same comic timing, and Starr's was the slowest, which is why Bill reads as a person and not a bit.

The criticism is obvious and he has heard it. He plays the surly outsider, the blunt one, the nerd who has decided everyone else is stupid, and he has played him since 1999. The teacher in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and its sequels, and Bodhi in Tulsa King (2022), opposite Sylvester Stallone, are variations rather than departures. It has not worn thin, because he does so little that there is nothing to tire of. But the part has never asked him to be wrong, or frightened, or fond of anyone, and we suspect he could manage all three. Someone should write it and find out.