Martin Starr, the deadpan actor who nearly quit at 22 and outlasted his cult shows

Martin Starr

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 30, 1982 Santa Monica, California, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home

Every few years Martin Starr turns up in somebody else’s show as the least impressed person in the building, and every few years a new audience decides he is the funniest thing in it. The current version is Bodhi, the cannabis-dispensary owner who stumbled into the orbit of Sylvester Stallone‘s exiled mobster in Tulsa King and never left, now back on Paramount+ for a fourth season. The flat, unblinking delivery travels from show to show almost untouched. What his career has never quite settled is whether that delivery is a range or a refuge, and whether an actor who once gave up on the business entirely has been handed enough room to find out.

Starr is a stage name. He came into the world as Martin James Pflieger Schienle, in Santa Monica, California, the son of the actress Jean St. James, and he was raised Buddhist. He was still a teenager when Paul Feig and Judd Apatow cast him as Bill Haverchuck in Freaks and Geeks, NBC’s comedy-drama about the misfits of a Michigan high school at the dawn of the eighties. Bill was gangly and deadpan, and the scene of him alone after school with a grilled cheese sandwich, laughing at Garry Shandling on television, is the one fans of the show still bring up first.

NBC cancelled the series after a single season in 2000, when Starr, born on July 30, 1982, was still 17. Its reputation grew in the years that followed; the work did not. “I think I just assumed that there would be an infinite amount of work from that show,” Starr told Wired in 2016. “Judd and Paul were very protective of us, because we were all really young and naive to what this business was.” Guest spots followed on Roswell and on Apatow’s Undeclared, plus a multicamera pilot opposite Wayne Knight that taught him mainstream sitcoms were not his thing. “The show was called Frozen Chunk Guy,” he recalled. “It didn’t get picked up.”

By 22 he had run out of patience. Frustrated and depressed over the lack of offers, he fired his agent, decided to quit acting for good and spent a day trying out for a barista job. He did not get it. He walked away with two dollars in tips.

The way back came through the same people who had found him. Apatow cast him as Martin, one of Seth Rogen‘s slacker housemates, in Knocked Up in 2007, and the same year brought small parts in Superbad and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. In 2009 Greg Mottola gave him Joel in Adventureland, a fellow employee at a run-down Pittsburgh amusement park alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart, and the Starz comedy Party Down made him Roman DeBeers, a caterer whose real ambition is hard science fiction and whose contempt for everyone else’s ambition is total. Wired later credited Party Down with bringing him back to television. It lasted two seasons, then came back for a third in 2023.

The role that turned the cult into a mass audience arrived in 2014. In Mike Judge’s HBO satire Silicon Valley, which ran until 2019, Starr played Bertram Gilfoyle, the systems engineer Wired described as a “fatalist-Satanist tech wiz”, trading insults with Kumail Nanjiani’s Dinesh across six seasons. When Wired visited the set in 2016 the cast was riffing between takes, and Gilfoyle’s lines landed with the precision of someone who had spent a decade refining a single register. Running alongside it was the strangest thread in his filmography: a bit part as a computer nerd in The Incredible Hulk in 2008, which Kevin Feige confirmed in 2019 was the same man as Roger Harrington, the academic decathlon teacher who chaperones Tom Holland‘s Peter Parker through Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

That is the comfortable version of the story: the geek from a cancelled show who got his revenge in prestige television and a Marvel franchise. It flatters everyone and leaves out the cost. The characters most people have seen him play run at one temperature, dry and superior and withholding, and the industry has paid him well to keep supplying it from the edge of the frame. When he has carried a film, the films have been small. He was Sam, an army veteran, in Sean Mullin’s Amira & Sam, a romantic comedy that reached a fraction of the audience that saw him standing at the back of a Spider-Man field trip, and he played opposite Lizzy Caplan in Save the Date at Sundance. His sharpest work since Party Down has mostly been played sideways, in reaction shots. The argument for Starr as a serious actor exists, but it has been made in rooms most of his fans never entered, and the deadpan that rescued his career has also fenced it in.

Tulsa King is where the fence has moved. He joined Taylor Sheridan‘s crime series in 2022 as Lawrence “Bodhi” Geigerman, a weed-store owner pulled into Dwight Manfredi’s crew, and the fourth season premiered on October 16, 2026, with Starr back as Bodhi in a cast that also includes Garrett Hedlund, Dana Delany, Neal McDonough and Gretchen Mol, under head writer Terence Winter. The show asks for the same deadpan but sets it against Stallone’s slow menace, and the contrast does something his comedies rarely did: it makes the stillness read as nerve. He has also kept moving outside the series, voicing Sherman in the animated Sausage Party: Foodtopia, turning up in the Japanese drama Vivant and playing Stewart in the 2025 remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a thriller that drew mixed reviews.

Next on the list is Hellhound, a zombie action-comedy from director Zach Golden led by Sam Rockwell and Marisa Tomei, set in a small New York town and announced in April with Starr in the ensemble; his character has not been revealed and no release date has been set. It is another supporting slot in another crowded cast, which is the shape his career has taken. The man who once settled for two dollars in tips is still working, more than a quarter century after Bill Haverchuck, and still waiting for a part that asks him to stop being the least impressed person in the room.

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Tags: actors, Judd Apatow, Sylvester Stallone, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Tulsa King, Martin Starr

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