Anthony Carrigan plays hard men who would rather be liked. As NoHo Hank in Barry he made a Chechen gangster's good manners funnier than anyone else's jokes, and then, without changing a thing, made them frightening.
Fi1m perspective
NoHo Hank thanks people for coming. He apologises for the inconvenience of a shooting, in the tone of a man whose restaurant has run out of the special. This is Anthony Carrigan's second-in-command to Goran Pazar in Barry (2018), a Chechen gangster who behaves like a hospitality manager.
He did not arrive by that road. His first regular part was Tyler Davies in The Forgotten (2009), and then he spent five years as the assassin Victor Zsasz in Gotham (2014), the sort of casting that follows an actor about. Hank was written as a small part and grew into a main role across the run of Barry, and Carrigan has said he likes "to take a character where everyone may have an idea of what it's supposed to look like and go in a completely different direction with it". That is the whole method: give the heavy good manners and a sunny disposition, and see what the audience does with its unease.
What the audience does is laugh, and then regret it. We laughed at Hank more than at anyone else in the show. Then a scene in a later season, which we will not describe, made us feel sick about having done so, and Carrigan got there without changing the performance at all. He simply went on being polite, and the show around him, with Bill Hader directing, stopped letting the politeness be a joke. It is a rare thing for a comic performance to become a frightening one on the same footing, and rarer for the actor to trust the writers enough not to signal the change.
Since Barry he has been asked for the eccentric rather than the heavy: an awkward time-travelling robot, Dennis Caleb McCoy, in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020), and a run in Twisted Metal (2023). We have not reviewed these and will not judge them at length, but the shape of what he offers is plain enough: a precise body, a voice he bends to whatever accent the part requires. The worry is the obvious one. An actor known for making villains nice can find that niceness becomes the new typecasting, a party trick booked by the scene.
Next comes Metamorpho in Superman (2025), the kind of film that likes a supporting eccentric and does not always know what to do with him once the joke has landed. Hank worked because the show had years to let the manners curdle. Two hours is a shorter run. We will watch to see whether anyone gives him the time.
Biography
Anthony Carrigan is an American actor. He is best known for portraying the Chechen mobster NoHo Hank in the HBO series Barry (2018–2023), for which he received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.
He has also appeared as Victor Zsasz in Gotham (2014–2019), Kyle Nimbus in The Flash (2014), and Dennis Caleb McCoy in Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). Carrigan graduated from Winchester High School and attended Carnegie Mellon University. He has had alopecia areata since childhood and has spoken publicly about the condition.
