Rockmond Dunbar

In Terriers (2010), Detective Mark Gustafson spends most of his scenes looking at Hank, the skint friend with a drink problem, and deciding whether to help him this time. Rockmond Dunbar plays that look as a man who has already given up on Hank twice and knows he is about to do it a third time. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to; the disappointment is in how long he waits before he answers.

That patience is what Dunbar has been hired for, over and over, since the mid-1990s. He began with a recurring part on Earth 2 (1994–95), was first properly noticed as Kenny Chadway on Soul Food (2000–04), and became known to a much wider audience as Benjamin "C-Note" Franklin on Prison Break (2005–09), a part he came back to in 2017. After that the badges arrived: Gustafson in Terriers, Sheriff Eli Roosevelt in Sons of Anarchy (2011–13), Dennis Abbott in The Mentalist (2013–15), and then Michael Grant on 9-1-1 (2018–21), the husband and father in a series about other people's emergencies. He noticed the pattern before we did, remarking in 2010 that "for the longest time I would always play the husband or the Dad, and I'm not married and I don't have any kids". Casting directors saw a man you would trust, and kept casting him as one.

The question is whether the writing trusts him back. In Terriers, Ted Griffin and Shawn Ryan wrote the supporting cast with more care than the format usually allows, and Gustafson got a proper interior to go with the badge. We found, in the second half of that single season, that we were often looking at Dunbar rather than at Hank in their scenes together, because his silence told us how much trouble Hank was in before Hank did. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), by contrast, he is Mr. Fire, a heavy in Shane Black's crime comedy, and our review did not stop to mention him, which is a fair measure of what the film asked of him.

He has said he prefers characters who are conflicted rather than merely presented, and the Roosevelt part in Sons of Anarchy is the one usually held up as giving him that. On the evidence we have reviewed, the steadiness is real and the parts rarely test it. The badge is a good fit and a small room. Someone should hand him a role with no uniform and no family in it, and see what he does when there is nobody to be steady for.