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We've never seen The Man (or The Man, obviously), but if we ever did, we think he'd bear a striking resemblance to Jude Ciccolella. Don't be fooled by his elegant, slightly feminine first name, nor by his deceptively ethnic surname: Jude Ciccolella is the personification of the WASP establishment, from his slowly balding pate to his mean, squinty eyes to his compact, stocky body, packed tight with man-strength. This is a man who doesn't need prison tats or exotic facial hair to project his air of menace: even from behind, it's clear that Ciccolella means business, and he will fuck you up.

Our perception of him is entirely due to Ciccolella's choices as an actor: brother's played some real bastards. His classic-cracker look means that when there's a vast governmental conspiracy or cabal of crooked cops, he's exactly the sort of establishment type who would definitely be in the loop: consider his roles in The Shawshank Redemption (corrupt prison guard), The Manchurian Candidate (embroiled in a plot to train American sleeper-agent assassins), and the "Mad Hops" episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (high-school basketball coach cherry-picking players for his championship team and then murdering the private investigator who figured it out). You may also recall Ciccolella from his roles as the profoundly villainous (and, not coincidentally, rather Rumsfeldian) Chief of Staff Mike Novick on 24, in which he totally let a fellow White House staffer die from a fall when she was about to reveal his evil deeds; or in Beloved as Schoolteacher, the sadistic slave owner. These are not quite the five people you meet in Heaven. They might, however, be the five people you meet in an unlicensed doctor's office, getting bullets dug out of their backs while they self-anesthetize with shots of bourbon and threaten what will happen to the doc if he whispers a word of this to the cops, and then, when they're all patched up, kill him anyway.

Perhaps it was with the knowledge of his past (fictional) crimes against humanity -- and we haven't even mentioned his appearances in deprav-o-fests like Sin City, High Crimes, and Night Falls On Manhattan -- that Ciccolella accepted his latest gig, playing Principal Raymond on Everybody Hates Chris. Though Raymond is certainly quite stern and forbidding -- to us; imagine how much scarier he must seem to a crowd of junior high-schoolers! -- it's clear that he has a strong grasp on the idea of justice; not only has he rescued the titular Chris from his bully, but he's even issued a de facto restraining order against the little punk, and made a point of enforcing it personally. Little does Raymond know that his young charge will grow up to be a fully functional and contributing member of society: the Chris Rock we know today. And Ciccolella's characters don't always have such good luck with the kids: consider the contrast with his Ed Kostyra, whose child grew up to be a hardened, possibly sociopathic ex-con: the Martha Stewart we know today! It's hard to imagine what ratio of tough to love Could yield a result like her, but it just reaffirms our choice never to reproduce.