Michael McKean

Michael McKean is one of those actors where you can learn a lot about a person by where they think of him first. He’s got a vast array of roles going back decades, and if, yeah, a ton of his credits are playing David St. Hubbins somewhere or another, and if he’s played Lenny Kosnowski if anything more often, if you count each episode separately, you can have a wide view of his career without familiarity with either of those things. It would be kind of weird, but it’s definitely possible. He’s got over 250 IMDb credits, which is a lot in a modern actor.

Frankly, McKean is one of those actors who turns out to be astonishingly intelligent. And that’s not “I don’t expect actors to be smart.” It’s “wow, even in any person, that’s smart.” The son of Gilbert S. McKean, music writer, record company executive, and ad man at varying times; and Ruth Stewart McKean, librarian, McKean has a BFA from Carnegie Mellon, which I didn’t even know gave BFAs but which turns out to be one of the finest dramatic arts schools in the country, and an MFA from NYU. His acting teacher at the latter was apparently Olympia Dukakis.

It was at Carnegie Mellon that he met David Lander. (You know him as Squiggy.) They joined the satirical comedy group The Credibility Gap, one of whose members was Harry Shearer. They made their movie debut in Cracking Up, about Californians’ response to a major earthquake. I’m not sure how he made his connection with Christopher Guest, but Guest’s first credit as Nigel Tufnel is on the Lenny and the Squigtones album from 1979. McKean’s skill as a musician and composer led to a long-standing association with Guest and eventually an Oscar nomination for “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow” from A Mighty Wind.

So, yes, he’s Lenny. And he’s David St. Hubbins. But he’s also Mr. Green in Clue. That same year, he was second-billed in the obscure but delightful D.A.R.Y.L. He did a Murder, She Wrote, and four vastly entertaining episodes of The X-Files. (Not to mention one of The Lone Gunmen.) He’s done enormous amounts of voicework and appeared as Perry White in Smallville, a show starring his actual wife, Annette O’Toole. They did an SVU together. He’s strongly connected with movie, TV, and movies, which always does make categorizing people for the site difficult.

How does all that prove he’s smart? Well, the Carnegie Mellon thing, of course. But also as I researched this article I discovered that he got over a million bucks on Celebrity Jeopardy! Wikipedia lists him as the twenty-second-highest earning game show winner of all time; he’s second under only Lisa Ann Walter in the celebrity category. This resulted in a huge donation, the biggest single donation they’ve ever gotten, to the International Myeloma Foundation. And, yeah, it often seems they dumb down the celebrity version, and Jeopardy! prizes have increased a lot over my lifetime. That still indicates he’s awfully smart.