Arnold Zwicky's Blog

If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.

In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.

This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.

While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).

Rachel Dratch. First came a re-play of a 2015 episode “Gut Check” of the police drama Unforgettable, centered on an apparently scatter-brained, flaky character Rosie Webb (who turns out to be genuinely goofy, but a good deal cannier than the investigators had supposed). I had that nagging feeling of familiarity, but let it pass.

Then much more recently (first appearing on 4/1, according to iSpot.tv), American Home Shield’s 30-second tv commercial, “Don’t Worry, Warran-Chi”, in which the actor plays an off-the-wall psychic, shown here with a characteristic expression on her face:

(#1) She detects a grocery shopper’s warran-chi, an aura indicating that he possesses the chi (life energy) that comes with an excellent home warranty (warran-chi is a punmanteau, a pun based on a portmanteau, as in my 11/1/23 posting “The punmanteau”)

From Wikipedia, where I discovered that she looked familiar because I remembered her from Saturday Night Live sketches:

Rachel Susan Dratch (born February 22, 1966) is an American actress and comedian. After she graduated from Dartmouth College, she moved to Chicago to study improvisational theatre at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. Dratch’s breakthrough role was her tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1999 to 2006. During her time on SNL, she portrayed a variety of roles including Debbie Downer. She has since occasionally returned to SNL as a guest portraying Senator Amy Klobuchar.

Billy Burke. Recently, this character actor made back-to-back appearances on my tv screen: from 1-2 pm (PT), as truly creepy serial killer Philip Stroh in Major Crimes (on Lifetime); from 2-3 pm, as earnest FBI agent Gabriel Dean (cautiously beginning a sweet connection to the character Jane Rizzoli) in Rizzoli & Isles (on Start TV). A disorienting change of gears — hard to get the monster Stroh out of my head.

In both roles, Burke (handsome but interestingly craggy-faced, a good thing in a male actor) projects somewhat unkempt and carefully guarded, even wary, masculinity, giving off a whiff of testosterone, but taking this character in different directions for the two roles. This seems to be his default presentation, as in this p.r. head shot from TMDB:

(#2) As Gabriel Dean, he smiles, but cautiously, and not for photos

Then, as Philip Stroh:

(#3) Shaven, scruffy, bearded

But he’s a versatile actor, who’s undertaken a wide range of parts, portraying many different characters (some of whom are easy-going and full of open smiles); it’s not all #2, much less #3. From Wikipedia:

William Albert Burke (born November 25, 1966) [stage name Billy Burke] is an American actor and songwriter [and performer]. [He] is known for his role as Charlie Swan in [the fantasy film] Twilight and its [four] sequels [2008-12]. In 2011, he played Cesaire in Red Riding Hood. In 2012, he was cast as one of the lead characters, Miles Matheson, in the NBC science-fiction series Revolution. From 2015 to 2017, he starred in the CBS series Zoo. He has also appeared in the supernatural horror film Lights Out (2016) and the thriller Breaking In (2018). [and tons of other stuff; long list in Wikipedia]

(It’s sheer accident that Dratch and Burke were both born in 1966.)

This entry was posted on April 18, 2024 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Actors, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Portmanteaus, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.