A nervous talker who is better than he first sounds. Sam Huntington has spent a career as the friend, the sidekick and the werewolf, and his four years as Josh Levison in Being Human show what he can do when a part is allowed to grow.
Fi1m perspective
Josh Levison talks when he is frightened, which in Being Human (2011) is most of the time. Sam Huntington plays him loud, hands moving, sentences colliding, a werewolf who has run from his family and seems to believe that if he keeps the conversation going nobody will ask what he turns into once a month. For a few episodes it plays as sitcom and we minded it. Then, around the middle of the first season, the chatter starts to read as fear, and the performance becomes the one we kept watching.
That is the trick he has, and it took a long run to show it. Huntington began in theatre in New Hampshire as a child, made his film debut in Jungle 2 Jungle (1997) opposite Tim Allen, and spent the next decade as the friend in other people's comedies: Detroit Rock City (1999), Fanboys (2009) and a string of teen films in between. Jimmy Olsen in Superman Returns (2006) was the same part with a bigger budget behind it. The pattern is the awkward one in the group, the man who is not the story but is standing next to it.
Being Human gave him 52 episodes across four seasons, and a lead is what the awkwardness needed. Sam Witwer plays Aidan with his shoulders down and his voice low; Meaghan Rath's Sally is stuck standing in doorways; Huntington is the noise in the house, and the show would be airless without him. His best scenes are with Kristen Hager's Nora, the nurse he cannot bring himself to ask out, and we were moved by them more than a werewolf in a house-share ought to allow, because he plays the wanting as plain shyness rather than as a curse. Nothing supernatural is happening when he fails to say the thing. That is the warmest stretch of the run, and it is his.
The limits are real. He has never carried a film, and his work since the series ended (Rosewood, 2015 to 2017; Sully, 2016; The Last Stop in Yuma County, 2023) is recurring and supporting again, done capably and not asked to do much. He is also, unusually, comfortable under heavy prosthetics, having worn them for the werewolf and before that for Cavemen, which is a skill the industry tends to reward with more prosthetics. What we know first-hand is what four seasons of one character showed: that he needs time, that he improves as the part deepens, and that he is better cast as the man who is scared than as the man who is funny.
Start with Being Human and give it the few episodes it needs to settle. Watch for the moment Josh stops trying to make you like him, because that is when Huntington starts working.
Biography
Sam Huntington is an American actor born on 1 April 1982 in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He began acting as a child at the Black Box Theatre, run by his mother, and appeared in stage productions with the Peterborough Players before making his screen debut in the 1996 television film Harvest of Fire.
Huntington is best known for playing Josh Levison, a werewolf, in the Syfy series Being Human (2011–2014). His other film and television credits include Jimmy Olsen in Superman Returns (2006), roles in Not Another Teen Movie (2001), Fanboys (2009) and Sully (2016), and recurring parts in Rosewood (2015–2017) and iZombie (2015). He is a great-nephew of actor Ralph Bellamy.
