Ed O'Neill

Watch what Ed O'Neill does when somebody else has the line. Nothing. He stands there, heavy in the shoulders, waiting for the nonsense to finish, and when he does speak it comes out flat and a beat late, as if the joke were a parcel he had agreed to carry. It is the stance of a gruff, working-class father who has heard it all before, and he has held it, with adjustments, across two of the longest runs in American comedy.

The first was Al Bundy in Married... with Children (1987–1997), a man who despised his life and said so for eleven seasons. O'Neill came to it late. A football career ended when the Pittsburgh Steelers cut him in 1969; there was New York theatre, then small stage and screen parts from the late 1970s, Cruising (1980) among them. Bundy made him famous and then shut the door. For a decade afterwards he took supporting film work, Wayne's World (1992), a run of policemen of which The Bone Collector (1999) is one, and shorter series, and audiences kept seeing the shoe salesman.

Modern Family (2009–2020) let him out. Jay Pritchett is Bundy's opposite in every particular but temperament: prosperous, remarried, surrounded by a family he cannot quite manage to disapprove of. We gave Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan's mockumentary 77 and thought it best in its first three seasons; the eight that followed mostly ran the jokes round again. O'Neill did not. Opposite Sofía Vergara he kept finding new ways for Jay to be caught being kind and to resent being caught, and by the later years we were, frankly, watching him rather than the scripts, because he was the one still doing something. He said of the pilot, "I liked the fact there were no jokes, that it was story-driven", and that is the actor he is. He does not tell jokes. He reacts, and a format built on looking into the camera gave him something to react to.

What he has rarely been allowed to do is carry a drama on his own. His comedy reputation meant dramatic turns were long treated as a stretch, and repeated work with David Milch, whose television is nobody's idea of a sitcom, has not shifted that impression as far as it should. His gift is the long run, hundreds of episodes in which a surly man gives way an inch at a time. Two hours is not enough to see it happen.

Lately he has lent the voice to animation, Wreck-It Ralph (2012) among them, where a gruff older man who owns the place is precisely what is wanted. If you want the real thing, go to the early seasons of Modern Family and watch him listen.