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Noah Emmerich doesn't look like a Noah Emmerich. The name "Noah Emmerich" sounds like a smarty-pants director of beloved, if overly clever, indie films that also have aliens and explosions in them -- you know, like a combination of Noah Baumbach and Roland Emmerich.

But the real life combo of Noah and Emmerich -- i.e., actor Noah Emmerich -- looks more like a Larry or a Gordo. He looks like a bad cop who took a wrong turn and now is in it up to his ears, right up to the fringe of his wispy curly hair. You can see him playing just such a man -- a bad, wrong-turn-taking Larry -- in Little Children. But you may also have seen him as Deputy Bill Geisler in Cop Land, or Marlon in The Truman Show, or Jack Tanner in Cellular, or Gordo Hersch in Frequency. He's just got a Gordo or Larry or Jack or Marlon kind of vibe.

Emmerich -- who can look quite handsome in real life -- can also be made to look quite un-handsome, which might explain why he gets cast so often as seedy or unreliable sidekicks, difficult men with troubled pasts and unadmirable opinions and histories spotted with regret. Physically, he looks kind of like Daniel Stern's skeevier older brother, or maybe Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch gone to seed. He's also got a bygone-era quality about him, but unlike, say, Jon Polito, Emmerich's bygone era isn't the dapper 1940s, but rather the pointy-collared polyester of the 1970s -- a quality put to excellent effect when he played assistant coach (of a U.S. Olympic hockey team) Craig Patrick, alongside Kurt Russell, in Miracle. Kurt Russell's also got an inherently '70s vibe. For whatever reason, the polyester just sticks.