In the next few weeks, Cole will be back juggling work on the CBS and HBO shows. This summer he has a multi-episode arc on USA’s “Suits” as a special prosecutor all too happy to flash a garbage-eating grin at his former protege before shoving a few slices of humble pie in the guy’s face. Adding to his recurring role on CBS’s “The Good Wife” (as ballistics expert and Diane Lockhart love interest Kurt McVeigh), this spring he joined the second season of the HBO political satire “Veep” as a White House numbers cruncher able to squash the vice president’s credibility with little more than an annoyed glance - a wonderfully meta-comical turning of the tables from Cole’s callow vice president (aka Bingo Bob) on “The West Wing.”
His list of TV credits is just as long, appearing on everything from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “30 Rock” to “Desperate Housewives” to “Entourage.” Every time you look up, it seems, there’s Gary Cole. He might be among the most underrated comedic performers working today. Will Ferrell’s scuzzy, estranged father in “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” All confident men who can’t quite mask an underlying idiocy.Ĭole’s appeal, whether he’s working big or dialing it back, is always that he seems in on the joke - and he knows how to time a straight-faced punch line with just the right amount of deeply buried sass and bite. The suspender-wearing, middle-manager nightmare known as Lumbergh in “Office Space.” A bewigged, utterly charming Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch” films.
Cole just has a knack for landing iconic roles. “There Is a Staggering 37.4 Percent That This Actor Was in Your Favorite Movie or Television Show” according to the jokey slideshow headline featuring all things Cole on the pop culture website Pajiba. And while Gary Cole, 28, offers none of Redford’s drawing power or rough-hewn good looks” - oh yeah, MacDonald apparently wanted Robert Redford to play him in the movie - “he delivers a performance that had preview audiences cheering and critics predicting an Emmy.”Īn Emmy nomination never did materialize, but a long and varied TV and film career was born.
“Although such notables as Christopher Reeve were considered for the part,” People magazine noted at the time, “the actor who plays the perfect son run amok in the NBC docudrama … is an unknown whose work has seldom been seen outside his native Chicago. Playing Jeffrey MacDonald, the real-life Army doctor who was convicted in 1979 of killing his wife and children, Cole - a mainstay of Chicago’s then-burgeoning Off-Loop theater scene - stepped into the role with barely any on-camera experience. Not a serial killer, but the 1984 TV miniseries “Fatal Vision” was Cole’s first major role. “Didn’t he play a serial killer?” an editor asked when I brought up Gary Cole’s name not long ago.
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