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See, this is one instance where I really wish we could just put up a picture of the H!ITG! in question, because I have a feeling that about half of you saw Harry Lennix's name and thought, "Oh, I loved her in the Eurythmics!" And, no. That's Annie Lennox -- elegant, yes, but doesn't generally behave as though she has a worry in the world. Harry Lennix, on the other hand, is making a fine living playing detectives, lawyers, doctors, political operatives: well-dressed men with brows set at Perma-Knit.

If you were a college student in the '90s, you probably remember Lennix as one of three campaign aides tending to the needs of the titular protagonist (Tim Robbins) in Bob Roberts. Though the political satire -- following the U.S. Senate campaign of a far-right folk singer as he leverages his celebrity in pursuit of power, smears his opponent, and frames a muckraking journalist for shooting him and leaving him paralyzed (...or is he?) -- seems less outlandish and implausible with each passing year, one detail that rang true then as now is that an ultraconservative candidate would hire, as his closest advisors, a token woman (Rebecca Jenkins) and a token black guy (Lennix). Generally, Lennix's Franklin Dockett behaves as though he's drunk the Roberts Kool-Aid; however, he does suffer one tense moment after a campaign appearance at a beauty pageant when several contestants show up on Roberts's bus and marvel that the pageant's token black beauty queen told them she didn't even like fried chicken. Sure, Roberts is running as an "Independent" (kind of like how Bill O'Reilly is an Independent), but Franklin's queasy discomfort to be helping elect a man who has no compunction against such casual racism might have rung some bells for real-life Republicans of colour -- as we may all know for sure years from now upon the publication of Throwing My Lot Behind An Empty-Suit Cracker, by Condoleezza Rice.

Lennix went on from there to show up in the usual places you see tall, attractive, serious-faced men with an air of anxious moral rectitude -- ER, JAG, The Practice, Diagnosis Murder, and any other TV show or mid-budget movie where you'd expect to hear someone in the Casting department asking around for "a young Joe Morton type." (He even played a good soldier in the Morton-in-Lone Star mode in the crappier two-thirds of the Matrix trilogy.) But Lennix apparently couldn't escape his political (acting) roots, and showed up last season as Chief of Staff Jim Gardner on Commander In Chief, the short-lived drama about Thelma running the country. (We didn't love the show or anything, but we are sorry it got cancelled before the President could be seduced by a sexy drifter.) The premise of the show was pretty much that Geena Davis's President Allen faced constant challenges to her authority because she was a woman, and even Lennix's Jim wasn't totally convinced that she was right for the job: perfect fodder to keep Lennix's forehead in a state of constant furrow.

And suddenly, we have an embarrassment of Lennix riches. If you like going out, you can hit the multiplex to see him in Stomp The Yard, worried that his nephew is going to flunk out of the university where Lennix's Nate works as a landscaper, and that he's dating the wrong girl. If you prefer to stay in, he's joined the cast of 24 as Walid Al-Rezani, head of a national Islamic advocacy group currently under investigation by the FBI in the wake of several domestic terror attacks. It's difficult to think what could be more worrisome for advocating in favour of Muslims in a setting as jingoistic as 24...unless it's the prospect that your nephew's stepping talents may be insufficient to allow him to give the yard the thorough stomping it requires.