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Who is Gary Cole?

And can we really call him a Hey! It's That Guy! if we can't identify his signature role?

Gary Cole has convincingly played über-dads in movies like I'll Be Home for Christmas and the Ur-dad in the big-screen Brady Bunch adaptations. The smooth cadence and soothing timbre of his voice made him an eerie dead ringer (vocally, anyway) for the late Robert Reed's Mike Brady, and he, more than any of the movie's other performers, really went the whole nine in filling out those '70s duds and embodying the irony-free shiny-happy attitude the film required. Rare is the actor who can don the white man's afro and behave as if he doesn't notice it. Gary Cole is such an actor.

But then there's the other Gary Cole -- the menacing creep in American Gothic, the homicidal maniac in Fatal Vision and spoiler A Simple Plan. This Gary Cole uses that same smooth cadence and soothing timbre to finesse his way past a victim's natural defenses...then kills him or her. Or at least makes him or her feel as if he might kill him or her -- that his air of menace is very real, and that the fear he causes them is legitimate. Sure, his face seems bland and friendly. But he's an enigma, you see?

As if to integrate, at last, the two dominant themes on his résumé, Gary Cole played the villain in last year's bitterly hilarious Office Space. As the office antagonist Bill Lumbergh, Cole delivered his lines -- painfully familiar to anyone who'd ever toiled under a middle manager with a Napoleon complex -- with a bored detachment meant to disguise his acute awareness of the petty power he wielded over his drones' very existence (at Initech, anyway). "Heeeeeey, Milton. What's happening?" A friendly greeting, no? "So if you could just go ahead and move your desk aaaaaaaaall the way back against that wall, that'd be greeaaaaaaat." A relatively mild work-related instruction, right? Wrong. Lumbergh represents the perfect marriage of Cole's bland dispassion and his steely malevolence -- and in that respect, it may be Gary Cole's signature role.