Scott Krinsky makes eccentric supporting characters funny by taking them seriously. His partnership with Vik Sahay in Chuck gives that deadpan approach its clearest use, though the oddball parts can leave him little else to do.
Fi1m perspective
At the Buy More in Chuck (2007), Scott Krinsky’s Jeff Barnes behaves as though there is nothing especially wrong with him being allowed near customers. Krinsky’s deadpan delivery makes that confidence funny without asking us to applaud the effort. He is a good supporting comic actor, particularly when an eccentric character has someone equally convinced of his own reasonableness beside him. Here that is Vik Sahay’s Lester Patel. We laughed at the pair despite ourselves, because both seem entirely sincere about behaviour that ought to get them supervised.
The route to Jeff ran through recurring work as Darryl in The O.C. in 2006–2007, with creator and producer Josh Schwartz providing the connection between the two programmes. Chuck then gave Krinsky five seasons in which to make his peculiar timing familiar. His stand-up background helps explain the attention to quirks that an audience responds to, but the performance is not a string of solo turns. The partnership with Sahay also supplied the programme with a musical double act.
The reservation is that this sort of casting can become a narrow assignment: arrive, look peculiar, supply the joke and leave the central business to somebody else. Krinsky’s work in Chuck is worth watching because Jeff feels like a person who belongs in that shop, rather than an interruption brought in to amuse us. The Buy More scenes often make better viewing than the espionage when the spy plots run thin. By the third season the formula wears thin too, and we would not pretend that affection for the staff repairs it.
After Chuck, Krinsky’s work included supporting parts in independent films: Parsimonious John in Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015) and Leonard in Dave Made a Maze (2017). We rate Tangerine highly, though its central friendship is made convincing by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor; it is not the place to build a large claim for Krinsky. Those credits offer less evidence for our view of him than the sustained work in Chuck. Start there, provided its affectionate workplace foolishness is worth some repetitive espionage to you.
Biography
Scott Krinsky is an American actor and stand-up comedian. He was born on 24 November 1968 in Washington, D.C., and attended Salisbury University, where he majored in communication and broadcast journalism. He has also studied at the Epicurean School of Culinary Arts in Los Angeles.
Krinsky is best known for playing Jeffrey "Jeff" Barnes, a series regular, in the NBC series Chuck (2007–2012). He previously appeared as Darryl in five episodes of The O.C. (2006–2007). Other television credits include Without a Trace (2005), Parks and Recreation (2009), Togetherness (2016) and Maron (2016). Film roles include appearances in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), Jobs (2013), Tangerine (2015) and Dave Made a Maze (2017). He performs stand-up at venues including the Comedy Store and the Improv in Los Angeles, and is also a writer.
