Seth Green's trade is the quiet one in a loud scene: the deadpan boyfriend, the sulking son, the cheerful dim voice at the table. A small gift, used well; his lasting work may be the show he makes rather than the ones he appears in.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997) and notice how little he does. Willow's boyfriend plays guitar in a band, speaks in short flat sentences and, when he turns out to be a werewolf, treats it roughly the way another boy would treat a part-time job. Everyone else in Sunnydale is quipping at speed; Green stands half a beat behind them, and the stillness is the joke. It is a small trick and he has been doing it since childhood, from a debut in The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) through a run of 1980s comedies.
The late 1990s made him. Oz ran from 1997 to 2000, a regular from the third season, and in the same years he was Scott Evil, Dr Evil's son, in the Austin Powers films (1997 to 2002). Then, in 1999, came Family Guy, where he has voiced Chris Griffin ever since. We called Chris slow and cheerful, and we stand by it. It is not a voice that does much, but in a show where Stewie and Brian carry the wit, somebody has to be the wall the jokes bounce off, and Green never tries to make Chris cleverer than he is.
The honest thing to say is that performing has been the smaller part of the career for twenty years. In 2005 he and Matthew Senreich created Robot Chicken, a stop-motion sketch series that acts out pop culture with action figures and toys, and he has written, directed and voiced it since, with Breckin Meyer a regular presence and Seth MacFarlane an early supporter. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. Around it sit the odd jobs: Lyle in The Italian Job (2003), Howard the Duck in the Guardians of the Galaxy films, and Changeland (2019), his first feature as director and writer, with himself in the cast.
The regret is Oz. Buffy is the better of the two series we have reviewed, and our review did not single him out, which is fair, because the writers gave him less to do each year. He left after the fourth season, and later said of it: "I felt like the character's potential vs. what we actually were doing were in drastic opposition." We felt the same watching it. There were episodes where the calmest person on screen plainly had the most interesting problem, and the camera kept walking past him to somebody louder.
He is an actor who has made a career of not raising his voice, and who then built a series out of toys to do the shouting for him. If you want the actor, watch the third season of Buffy. If you want the rest of him, you will have to look at the toys.
Biography
Seth Green is an American actor, voice artist, producer and director. He is known for his role as Daniel 'Oz' Osbourne, a guitarist and werewolf, on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2000). He also voices Chris Griffin on the animated series Family Guy (1999–present) and created, directed and produced the stop-motion series Robot Chicken (2005–present).
Green was born on 8 February 1974 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His early film roles include appearances in The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), Radio Days (1987) and Big Business (1988). He gained wider recognition for playing Scott Evil in the Austin Powers film series (1997–2002) and has voiced Howard the Duck in several Marvel Cinematic Universe projects, including Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and its sequels.
