Toby Huss is an Iowan who has spent thirty years being cast as a Texan, mostly as a voice. It is a good voice, exact and unshowy, and it now belongs to Dale Gribble. We rate him, in the supporting doses he is usually given.
Fi1m perspective
Put Cotton Hill and Kahn Souphanousinphone next to each other, two of Toby Huss's voices on King of the Hill (1997), and nothing in the sound of one gives away the other. That is the job as Huss understands it: not to be spotted. He has been at it since the early 1990s, first in MTV promotional spots and then as Artie in The Adventures of Pete & Pete (1993–96), and for most of that time his working tool has been a Texan accent he had no birthright to, since he is from Marshalltown, Iowa. The twang is built, not inherited, and he knows how much of it to use.
The career splits into voice and face. The voice came first: Beavis and Butt-Head, then thirteen years on King of the Hill (1997–2010) under Mike Judge, doing two regulars who share nothing but a postcode. The face followed on television, as Stumpy in Carnivàle (2003–05) and, at greater length, as John Bosworth across four seasons of Halt and Catch Fire (2014–17), a Texas businessman in a drama about computers. On Bosworth's accent he said, "I didn’t want to get too twangy with it, though, because I didn’t think he was that kind of a guy." That is the method in a sentence: decide who the man is, then give him only the voice he would have.
In 2025 he took over Dale Gribble for the King of the Hill revival, and this is the part on which most viewers will judge him. Our review said it takes a little getting used to, and we will own that: for the first episodes we were listening for the join rather than the jokes, because Dale's is the voice in that cast we could pick out of a crowded bar, and hearing it come from someone else felt like a friend with a cold. Then the show did what it always does, a quiet week in Arlen with nothing exaggerated, and we stopped noticing. Huss does not do an impression. He plays the man, and the voice follows.
In Weapons (2025) he is Captain Ed, a part small enough that our review did not mention him, which is a fair account of his film work generally: he is there, he is right, and he is gone before you have placed him. The one reservation worth making is that he is nearly always sent to the same address, the regional eccentric, the southern supporting man, and we have rarely seen him handed anything else. He has other things in him. He invented a Sinatra-flavoured lounge singer called Rudy Casoni and put out an album as him in 2003, which tells you something about a performer who mostly plays other people's neighbours. If someone offers him a lead who was born north of Texas, we would like to see it. Until then, listen for him; you will not spot him first.
Biography
Toby Huss is an American actor born on 9 December 1966 in Marshalltown, Iowa. He attended the University of Iowa before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
His early prominent role was as Artie in the Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete (1993–1996). He has voiced characters including Kahn Souphanousinphone and Cotton Hill on King of the Hill (1997–2010, 2025–present) and later Dale Gribble in the revival, as well as roles in Beavis and Butt-Head. Television credits include Felix "Stumpy" Dreifuss in Carnivàle (2003–2005), John Bosworth in Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017) and Edward Dickinson in Dickinson (2019–2021).
Film roles include appearances in Halloween (2018), Copshop (2021), Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) and Captain Ed in Weapons (2025). Huss also works as a painter and photographer.
