Matt Walsh plays men who have already lost the argument. His press secretary in Veep is the best example: a professional who stopped trying some time before the cameras arrived. Elsewhere he is a dependable face in other people's comedies, rarely given more to do.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Matt Walsh does when somebody insults him. Most comic actors take the hit and hand one back. Walsh takes it, waits, and lets us see a man doing the sums and deciding that a reply is not worth the effort. As Mike McLintock, the press secretary in Veep (2012), he spent seven seasons on the receiving end of a staff built to be kicked, and he played a man who had given up some time before we met him. It is a small thing to do well and hardly anybody does it.
The career behind it is longer than most viewers know. Walsh came out of Chicago improv, co-founding the Upright Citizens Brigade in 1991 with Matt Besser, Amy Poehler and Ian Roberts, and the troupe's own sketch series in 1998 was an early outing. He did two years as a correspondent on The Daily Show (2001–2002), then a decade of supporting parts, several of them for Todd Phillips, who has now used him five times and has a habit of naming the character Walsh or Valsh; Dr Valsh in The Hangover (2009) is the one people remember. He created and starred in Players (2010) and has directed two features, High Road (2012) and A Better You (2014). Then Armando Iannucci gave him Mike, and Mike is what he will be remembered for.
The improv shows. Walsh is at his best reacting, not initiating; put him in a room with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in full flight and he becomes the audience's stand-in, absorbing the abuse so we do not have to. We laughed at Mike for years and then, somewhere around the middle seasons, found we were a little sorry for him, because Walsh never lets the exhaustion become a bit; his face just quietly stops expecting anything. The limitation is the flip side. Outside Veep he is mostly cast in small, put-upon parts, the beleaguered official, the doctor, the man behind the desk, and he plays them well without being asked to do anything more. Our review of Vladimir (2026), where he is David in the supporting ranks of Rachel Weisz's professorial midlife crisis, scored the series 67 and did not stop on him, and that is a fair account of the part.
Walsh has said that people who can do comedy well do not get enough credit, and that it can be harder than drama. On the evidence of Mike he is right. Whether anyone will write him another part large enough to prove it is another matter. Until then, the seven seasons of Veep are the place to see what he can do, and everywhere else he will be in the second row, doing the job and doing it properly.
Biography
Matt Walsh is an American comedian and actor. He was born Matthew Paul Walsh on 13 October 1964 in Chicago, Illinois. He is a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade sketch comedy troupe and appeared in its original television series and the 2015 reboot.
Walsh is best known for playing Mike McLintock in the series Veep (2012–2019), for which he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. He has appeared in films including Elf (2003), The Hangover (2009), Due Date (2010) and Ghostbusters (2016). He played David in the 2026 Netflix series Vladimir.
