Michael Stuhlbarg Led One Film and Has Played Every Deputy Since

Michael Stuhlbarg

Photo: LBJ Library from Austin / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 5, 1968 Long Beach, California, USA
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Call Me by Your Name, Arrival, Doctor Strange
Awards	Drama Desk · Obie · SAG Award (shared) · Elliot Norton

In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, Tom Cruise gets the latex, the oil fortune and the meltdown. Michael Stuhlbarg gets the vice presidency: a man who stands one step behind John Goodman‘s ailing President Compson, waits, and finally inherits a country his boss has helped to drown. Several critics who disliked the film walked out talking about him. The pattern is familiar by now. Stuhlbarg has spent most of his screen career one chair away from the centre, and that chair keeps getting more interesting.

The puzzle is that he proved early he could sit in the middle. In the Coens’ A Serious Man he is in nearly every scene as Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern physics professor whose life is taken apart by a tenure committee, a departing wife and a God who will not return calls. Roger Ebert wrote that Stuhlbarg played Gopnik not as a loser but “as a hopeful man who can’t believe what’s happening to him.” The performance brought a Golden Globe nomination. Leading roles did not follow. Something stranger did.

The training behind that precision was unusually wide. Stuhlbarg was raised in Long Beach, California, where he was born on July 5, 1968, the son of a salesman who went on to manufacture security products, in a Reform Jewish household. He graduated from the Juilliard School’s drama division in 1992, after detours that took him to the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and to mime lessons with Marcel Marceau.

For more than a decade the stage was the job. He made his Broadway debut in 1993 in a George Bernard Shaw revival and played Hamlet in Central Park in 2008. The role that changed his standing came in 2005 with Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. He gained around 50 pounds to play Michal, a brain-damaged man shaped by years of parental abuse, and won a Drama Desk Award along with his first Tony nomination. The New York Times praised how he caught both the innocence and the ugliness of the character.

Television gave him the long form. As Arnold Rothstein in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, a series whose pilot Martin Scorsese directed, he played the New York kingpin as a man who never raised his voice because he never had to. The character lasted four seasons, until 2013, and the cast collected two Screen Actors Guild ensemble awards. Scorsese then cast him as the film historian René Tabard in Hugo, and Steven Spielberg made him the Kentucky congressman George Yeaman in Lincoln.

Then came the real people. He was Lew Wasserman opposite Anthony Hopkins‘s Alfred Hitchcock, and Andy Hertzfeld, the original Macintosh engineer, in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. In Trumbo he was Edward G. Robinson, the star caught in the Hollywood blacklist. He played a CIA agent in Arrival and Benedict Cumberbatch‘s rival surgeon in Doctor Strange.

One season defined the method. Stuhlbarg appeared in three Best Picture nominees in the same awards year, something only a handful of actors had managed before him. He learned Russian dialogue to play Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, the Soviet scientist with divided loyalties in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which won the prize. He played the New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal in Spielberg’s The Post. And in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name he was Mr. Perlman, the archaeology professor who closes the film with a quiet speech to his son, played by Timothée Chalamet. Guadagnino said he cast him because he wanted someone who could carry softness and warmth while communicating great knowledge and culture. The critic Nell Minow called that speech one of the most moving scenes ever filmed.

Prestige television then turned the method into a career. He was the counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke in The Looming Tower and the Purdue Pharma executive Richard Sackler in Dopesick, and both roles earned Emmy nominations. In Your Honor, opposite Bryan Cranston, he played Jimmy Baxter, a New Orleans crime boss who frightens people by sounding reasonable.

There is a cost to being the industry’s most reliable impersonator. Hertzfeld, Robinson, Wasserman, Rosenthal, Clarke, Sackler: casting directors hire Stuhlbarg for verisimilitude, and verisimilitude is a service, not a showcase. No studio has built a film around him since A Serious Man. One of his most substantial parts of the period, Gore Vidal’s partner Howard Austen in a biopic starring Kevin Spacey, vanished when the film was shelved during post-production amid the allegations against Spacey. More recently he has been the best-reviewed element of films critics did not like. Reviews of Guadagnino’s After the Hunt split on whether his psychiatrist husband to Julia Roberts was the film’s moral centre or a man reduced to gesturing in the background. Digger drew polarised notices and a weak box office start against a nine-figure budget. Being the good thing in a flawed film is a compliment. Repeated often enough, it becomes a box.

The stage still lets him lead. In 2024 he returned to Broadway as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky in Peter Morgan’s Patriots, a role that brought his second Tony nomination, this time as best leading actor in a play. On screen he kept refining the menace: a Russian arms dealer opposite Rami Malek in The Amateur in 2025, then the Guadagnino reunion that autumn, his third film with the director after Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All.

He married Mai-Linh Lofgren in 2013 and keeps the rest of his private life out of interviews.

Digger had its world premiere in London on September 22, 2026, and reached cinemas in Britain and the United States on October 2. No next role has been announced. In the film, the vice president finally gets the top job only after everyone above him is gone, which is a neat joke about the actor playing him. Stuhlbarg has never needed the throne to be the reason people watch the room.