How do we define an “underrated” actor or actress? Typically, it’s a character actor who’s appeared in dozens if not hundreds of movies and TV shows without quite reaching the upper echelon of stardom. That’s no knock on these performers’ talents. In fact, they’ve often proven their abilities to carry films with leading roles in independent movies, or they’ve won major awards. Just like any sampling of the population, performers from this subcategory come from all walks of life, and have all kinds of backstories. Some have famous relatives. Others have shocking medical histories. Still others might have hidden passions or talents. These biographical details might not affect their work on camera, but they’re interesting all the same. Here are 12 underrated actors from the 1990s and 2000s with shocking stories to tell.
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Best known for roles like Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day or Max in Thelma and Louise, Stephen Tobolowsky has been appearing in movies and TV since the 1970s. At one point early in his career he was doing local theater in Hartford, CT, when he got into two life-threatening altercations in on week. First, a man pulled a gun on him in a bar. Two days later, another man stabbed him in a pizza parlor.
The Departed and The Conjuring franchise star Vera Farmiga was born in New Jersey, but her family hails from the Ukraine. Farmiga grew up in a Ukrainian immigrant community and didn't speak English until attending first grade at age six. In her teens, Farmiga participated in a Ukrainian folk dancing troupe, which was allowed to tour Ukraine shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Farmiga describes the dance as a cross between Irish step dancing and Cossack kick dancing. She still occasionally indulges in it when she’s had a few drinks.
New Zealander Melanie Lynskey's breakout role was in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, and since then she's appeared in dozens of TV series from Yellowjackets to The Last of Us to Castle Rock. As her husband Jason Ritter revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Lynskey also suffers from misophonia, which is specific sounds are perceived more intensely. For Lynskey, the worst sound is smacking lips. "They hear it 20 times louder than you do and it drives them insane," Ritter explained.
Sam Rockwell has turned up in dozens of comedies and dramas over his career, which includes an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He also suffered a serious hand injury in a car accident, which required a total reconstruction of his appendage. Here’s how he described it to Esquire: I flipped a car. I think the same thing sort of happened to Shia LaBeouf, except his hand was hurt worse than mine, but my fingers were crushed and then reconstructed.
Frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator and German-Austrian actor Christoph Waltz is known for playing menacing villains, like the Nazi fugitive hunter Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. However, this is just one portion of his show business career. Waltz grew up in Vienna, where his father was a composer and conductor, and as a teenager he attended at least two operas a week. While pursuing his acting career, Waltz also decided to pursue directing operas to feed his “obsession” with music. In 2013, Waltz directed Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Belgium's Opera Vlaanderen. Four years later, he returned there to direct Verdi's Falstaff. In 2020, he directed Beethoven's Fidelio at his hometown venue, Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. When directing opera, Waltz insists his performers use a realistic and grounded style more commonly found in theater and film.
Rachel Getting Married and United States of Tara star Rosemarie DeWitt is the granddaughter of 1930s boxer and unlikely heavyweight champion James J. Braddock, who was nicknamed “Cinderella Man” after defeating Max Baer in 1935, and who later lost the title to boxing legend Joe Louis. Braddock's life was dramatized in the 2005 Ron Howard biopic Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe as Braddock. DeWitt has a supporting role in the film as Sara Wilson, wife of fictional character Mike Wilson (Paddy Considine), a bankrupt Wall Street broker and friend of Braddock's. DeWitt's mother, and Braddock's daughter, Rosy, is played by Ariel Waller.
Los Angeles-born actor James Cromwell’s resume spans nearly 200 credits, including a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his role as Farmer Hoggett in 1995’s Babe. Cromwell also comes from a show business family with a dark past. His mother Kay Johnson, an actress, was married to his father John Cromwell, who directed films like Of Human Bondage, Algiers, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Although the older Cromwell was a liberal Democrat he was no communist. He did, however, have a contract with RKO Pictures, which he signed weeks before Howard Hughes purchased the movie studio in 1948. Hughes, an avowed anti-communist, later passed along Cromwell’s name to the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The accusation was false, but Cromwell was blacklisted until 1959. The elder Cromwell's experiences inspired Robert to a lifetime of activism. Among many other projects, he’s participated in a legal defense of the Black Panthers, and he’s campaigned for animal right - inspired by his experiences filming Babe.
Judy Greer has been in more than 150 movies and TV shows, many of them critically acclaimed comedies. As she told The Guardian, she's often recognized for her role on Arrested Development as Kitty Sanchez, the flashing, spring break-loving Bluth company receptionist as well as George Sr.'s (Jeffrey Tambor) mistress and criminal co-conspirator. Specifically, people flash her. As she told the show's creator Mitch Hurwitz, “Oh, yeah, thanks by the way for all the people flashing their t*** at me all the time.” He responded, “What? Do people do that?” To which she fired back, "Yes people f****** do that. That's all they do. I get flashed all the time." It's mostly men."
In 2015, Juliette Lewis shared an anecdote about her Cape Fear co-star Robert DeNiro. In 1994, three years after filming Cape Fear, Lewis ran into DeNiro at a bar, where DeNiro complimented Lewis on her recent role in the dark crime comedy Natural Born Killers. A 20-year-old Lewis confidently responded that she'd improvised 90% of her lines. This didn't impress DeNiro, according to Lewis: Bob looked at me sternly and said, "Oh no. No don't ever disrespect the writer. Don't you ever disrespect the writer or your director. Ever." In that one moment I realized so much, I felt like I grew 5 yrs. I never made that mistake again. And I am so thankful he took the time to school a very young J Lewis. A lot of teachers I'd reject what they'd say being so prideful and self protecting. But when he said it, I knew exactly what he meant! Grace and respect. Goes a long way! He's a class act!
Comedic character actor Diedrich Bader has had memorable roles in everything from the Mike Judge comedy Office Space to the seminal 1990s sitcom The Drew Carey Show, on which he played Drew's dim-witted friend Oswald Lee Harvey. Since then, he's made regular appearances in movies and on TV, and carved out a respectable filmography in voice acting alone. As a working actor, Bader has dealt with his fair share of rejection and frustration. He channels those experiences into his gardening. Bader explains, I like gardening because it's both practical and a mind palace… I found in my life that there's a lot of rejection. I get rejected far more than I get accepted. You know, an actor's life. For a long time, I took those rejections far too seriously. It was too impactful in my life. I would get bitter, I would drink about it, I would ruminate on them, and I wouldn't let them go. And I find that in the garden, if I get a rejection, which happens all the time, I sit in the garden and I allow myself to really be upset about it and just think it over. One of the things I was trying to do before, which was wrong, was push it away. I've learned that anytime you push something away, it just gets stronger, and it always stays in front of you. You can't push things to the side. You're just pushing it ahead of you and eventually you're going to have to go through it. So just go through it when you're there and go, "Damn, I didn't get it." So, I'll sit there and look at the garden, and before I know it, there's something that I need to do. I'll get up and I'll start doing it. Then about a half hour, 40 minutes later, I forgot all about the rejection. Today, Bader devotes his Instagram account to sharing photos of his flowers.
Today, Jennifer Coolidge is best known for playing scene stealing powerhouses. She's appeared in Christopher Guest movies like A Mighty Wind. She dominated the first two seasons of The White Lotus as the deluded vacationer Tanya McQuoid. She's Stifler's Mom! She's come a long way to get here. Like many performers, Coolidge worked day jobs before launching her acting career. In her early 20s, while waitressing in New York City, she often talked her way into night clubs by pretending to be a made-up daughter of Ernest Hemingway named “Muffin.” To be fair to Coolidge, one of Hemingway's granddaughters was nicknamed “Muffet," so it wasn't completely out of left field. It often worked. Coolidge recalls, “One time I got thrown out of a club because I was behaving badly, and they said, ‘Don’t ever come back here, Muffin!'"
The fact that The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games actor Stanley Tucci enjoys food shouldn't be a surprise. The actor explored his relationship with food in his 2021 cancer memoir Taste, and he hosted the travel and cuisine show Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy on CNN. But Tucci's love of food stems back to his childhood, and specifically watching Julia Child's TV series. He recalls, I was kind of obsessed with Julia Child - I've been ever since I was a kid. My mom watched Julia Child. She revered Julia Child. I remember watching her show when I was young and almost crying at the end of it because she was so passionate about what she did. She loved what she did so much… I was moved. I was moved at the end of it, and it was only years later, when I thought back on it, I thought why did I feel that way? What made me feel that way? And I realized it was because, like I said, her passion for what she did, her love for what she did was so profound that you hoped to go through your life like that. Things came full circle when Tucci played Child's husband Paul in the 2009 Nora Ephron dramedy Julie & Julia.
