Jeremy Sisto

Sisto's screen career got moving in the early-to-mid 1990s, and it didn't take long for him to land something that stuck. Clueless (1995) — Amy Heckerling's sharp, Austen-riffing comedy — gave him Elton, a role that's easy to underestimate. It's a supporting part, but Sisto plays the character's particular brand of high school arrogance with enough specificity that you don't forget him. That kind of supporting work can define a young actor's early reputation, and for Sisto it signaled he could hold his own in ensemble casts without disappearing. The late 1990s brought Jesus, a TV film that asked considerably more of him — carrying a title role in a biblical drama is a different assignment entirely, and Sisto took it on. Thirteen followed, the raw 2003 coming-of-age film directed by Catherine Hardwicke, where Sisto appeared alongside Holly Hunter and Evan Rachel Wood in a story about adolescent freefall. Hard to say if that film gets enough credit for how well its adult cast held the frame around two extraordinary young performances, but Sisto's presence was part of what grounded it. Television is where Sisto spent some of his most sustained time. His run as Billy Chenowith on HBO's Six Feet Under gave him a recurring role across the series' acclaimed run — Billy is one of those characters who can walk into a scene and immediately shift its emotional weather, and Sisto clearly relished that instability. Then came Law & Order, where he joined the long-running NBC procedural as Detective Cyrus Lupo (Wikipedia). Two very different registers, both handled with the kind of commitment that keeps a career moving forward across decades.