John Paul Reynolds

Watch Drew Gardner in Search Party (2016) when the group decides to do something stupid. He does not object. He looks at Alia Shawkat's Dory, works out what she wants, and gives it to her, and the small delay before he does is the performance. Drew is the boyfriend who is kind and therefore dull, and Reynolds makes kindness look like a decision, taken freshly each time and at some cost. It is the hardest job in the ensemble, because John Early and Meredith Hagner get the lines and he gets the reaction, and he makes the reaction worth watching.

He came up through Chicago improv, at IO and Second City from the age of 18, and it shows in how little he pushes. Guest parts on television from 2015 led to Drew, whom he played across five seasons until 2022, as the passive partner drawn step by step into things a passive partner should have walked away from. Around it he has been Officer Callahan in Stranger Things (2016), Caleb Duffy in Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019), the lead in a 2020 science fiction comedy, and turned up in Horse Girl (2020). Most of these are variations on the same hapless, conflict-avoidant man, and he knows it.

What works is the long game. Given five seasons, Reynolds can let a character's morals bend a degree at a time, so that the man at the end is recognisably the man at the start and also someone else. We found, somewhere in the first season, that we were watching Drew's face rather than Dory's whenever the four of them agreed on something, because his was the only one registering what it would cost. The dark joke of Search Party is that doing the decent thing never helps, and Reynolds plays the decency straight so the joke can land.

What does not work, yet, is the range of the offer. Critics have found little to fault, which is partly because he has rarely been asked for anything the boyfriend could not supply. He has said as much himself: "I was dying to play a villain. It's fun to be bad, and it's fun to be gross." Detective Matt Saracusa in Yellowjackets (2023) is the first serious attempt at that, an assertive man where before there were only accommodating ones, and there are writing credits beginning to appear alongside the acting.

We have not reviewed the villain, so we will not judge him. Start with Search Party, where the early seasons are sharp and the later ones broader, and pay attention to what Reynolds does when the script stops letting him be the reasonable one. That is where the next ten years will be decided.