6. Alan Tudyk
Why He Is Awesome... Just look at that face. At least on screen, this man is generally the embodiment of a goofball. Probably best known as the Chinese mangling Wash from
Firefly, Tudyk largely plays personable clowns. That is his schtic, and he is great at it. He's a kind of gawky guy with an effervescent personality to match, and he looks like an amusing individual. Whether he's composing poetry about his "corpsified and gross" wife Zoe, warning a naked Paul Bettany that he'll beat him inside out in
A Knight's Tale, or improvising a speech about how life's road is like a ladle in a exaggerated accent for
28 Days (not to be confused with the thriller), he's just fun to watch. In voice acting performances such as King Candy for
Wreck-It Ralph or background voices the
Ice Age movies, he brings the same nervous energy. It gives him an excellent niche to work in.
Yet He Doesn't Get Credit For... As my first sentence was meant to indicate, Alan Tudyk is kind of thought of as "the goofball" through and through. Almost to the extent that Alan Tudyk equals Wash in people's minds. And since he is that type of character in much of his work, it is understandable. But since we're on the subject, he deserves credit for his more serious performances as well, if only to remind viewers that he does have that side. A perfect example of this is his role of Sonny the robot in
I, Robot from 2004. This is one part where Tudyk is in no way a ham. In addition to going through training to bring fluid motion to the simple, as well as acrobatic, movements of Sonny, he manages to deliver a voice that, while mechanical, expresses the developing emotions of a robot discovering his own sense of humanity. In
Dollhouse, Tudyk switches from his familiar lovable absurd character to a sneering villain in the blink of an eye. Although this in no way means he shouldn't be held in high esteem for his work in comedies and feel free to stick to those roles, since diversity is the name of the acting game, it should be said that when called upon, Tudyk can play that game with the best of them.