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Let's say you're a well-known, very successful TV producer, and you find an actor he really admires. This actor is talented and works a fair bit, but almost always in one-off guest-starring spots on various TV series. You have a show, and you want to give the guy a break, so of course you give him a crucial role on your fancy, award-baiting HBO drama. But then, unfortunately, the story demands that his character be killed, which means your beloved actor gets written out of the show! Right? Wrong: give him a different beard and bring him back next season as a whole other character.

"You," in this case, are David Milch -- kind of a nut, according to that New Yorker profile last year -- which is why no one else on Deadwood bothers to tell you that when you kill off Garret Dillahunt in the role of Jack McCall and the recast him in the next season as prospector/Hearst muscle/rapist-murderer Francis Wolcott, people are going to notice that shit. But, also, they might not notice: as Jack McCall, Dillahunt had a lazy eye and scrubby facial hair, dressed like a hobo, and was drunk most of the time, whereas Francis Wolcott was quite elegant and dapper. It took several episodes' viewing and a bet-settling trip to the IMDb for this commentator to be entirely sure both characters were being played by the same actor. And while it was an odd move for the show -- are we supposed to think the characters are brothers? Soul twins? Clones? -- Dillahunt is pretty awesome. Maybe he'll be back in Season 3 as Bullock's cousin and die again. He could be Deadwood's Kenny!

Perhaps another reason Milch decided to use Dillahunt more than once was that the two roles he had to cast were really bad seeds -- a kind of character Dillahunt excels at playing. This season alone, he's been a Karl Rovian chief of staff to a Democratic congressman on Law & Order and a deadbeat dad-cum-convict in a recurring role on ER as Steve, biological father to Sam (Linda Cardellini)'s horrendous son Alex (some kid). We don't care how hard the show works to convince us that Alex is effed-up because his mother was a teenager when he was born and his dad was...not, which is gross; Alex is a little bitch, and Sam should have let him run away any of the times he's tried to escape her. Dillahunt took over the role of Steve from Cole Hauser when the latter decided, we guess, that he was too big for episodic TV drama and moved on to make the likes of Paparazzi and The Cave instead, but Hauser's loss is ER's gain; Hauser is a lightweight, menace-wise, compared to the silkily terrifying Dillahunt...

...which is why it was so fantastic when Dillahunt ended up (however briefly) on The Book Of Daniel, playing Jesus. (Yes, that one -- Jesus H. Christ.) Despite the many miscreants and malcontents he'd portrayed, Dillahunt was believable as the Lord: gentle, non-judgmental, good listener, nice comic timing. One memorable scene had a couple of engaged congregants who've ended up in a sexual rut telling the titular Episcopalian minister Daniel (Aidan Quinn) that, partly based on his advice, they've decided not to marry, but to continue living in sin. Jesus (visible only to Daniel), sitting on the couch behind them, catches Daniel's eye to give him a deliciously sarcastic double thumbs up. You kind of had to be there -- and you weren't, based on the fact that the show was cancelled after four episodes. But since most other Dillahunt characters would only get behind other characters to stab them in the backs, his Jesus -- particularly in that moment -- was a refreshing departure from type.

Oh, and can we just have a sidebar about the man's name? It's the kind of handle you're more likely to find on a character in Dickens than a dude born in the '60s. It's more than half the way to a line of iambic pentameter. Maybe producers always intended to give the characters such monikers as "Charlemagne Moody" (on One Life To Life) and "Bryce Coopersmith" (on NYPD Blue), or maybe they were inspired to make them a bit more special after hearing Dillahunt's ornate antique of a real-life name.

After this week's ER finale, Dillahunt's next known part will be in the Brad Pitt vehicle The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Despite his pedigree, Dillahunt plays Ed Miller, rather than the infamous Coward, as one might have expected. Even so, Dillahunt's track record suggests that Ed Miller isn't likely to cover himself with much glory either. Unless he's the basis for a widely practised western religion, that is.