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No doubt Arye Gross is not a hapless nerd in real life, at least not any more so than you or I. He's a well-regarded actor who's taught at the acting school at USC and starred in acclaimed stage productions of Three Sisters, Taming of the Shrew, and Troilus and Cressida. But put him onscreen and it's nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd, nerd. And all of them hapless. Completely devoid of hap.

Perhaps you enjoyed Gross's prodigious lack of hap during his stint as Adam Green, one of Ellen DeGeneres's sidekicks on Ellen, a sitcom in which Ellen's apartment served as a kind of hive of haplessness, with Ellen herself as the hap-free queen bee. You can currently enjoy Green's now-with-50%-less-hap performance in Minority Report, in which he plays a cuckolded husband who can't even properly stab his wife with a pair of scissors without getting chucked, sobbing, to the carpet by brawny PreCrime cops.

Other than that, Gross doesn't have a buffet-plate load of notable credits to his name yet, but there's something about his brand of haplessness that insinuates itself into your memory. He is, in some sense, haplessness personified -- or, at least, the personification of every actor who was ever cast as the guy with the clogged sinuses in the nasal spray commercial. Either way, in a town in which everyone is trying to out-hap each other, Gross's complete and unabashed lack of hap is a welcome -- and, for him, fortuitous -- quality, and we expect great hapless things from him for years to come.