Anthony Carrigan Keeps Milking Bit Parts for All They’re Worth

In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Anthony Carrigan explains how he pulled off his mostly mute, scene-stealing role in the novel A24 film Death of a Unicorn—and describes the personal breakthroughs that led to major roles in Barry, the upcoming Superman, and more.

There’s a scene in Death of a Unicorn that Anthony Carrigan feels particularly proud of, though he’s hardly its focus. It’s a tense moment involving a wealthy patriarch named Odell (Richard E. Grant), his scheming wife Belinda (Téa Leoni), their butler Griff (Carrigan), and as you might surmise from the title, some unicorns. The camera holds on Belinda for the most part, hopeful and in awe of her husband seemingly asserting his dominance. But direct your eye to Griff, lurking in the background, and you’ll find that Carrigan’s expression is one of palpable terror. He solely, completely changes the mood of the scene, even as he’s just helplessly watching on.

“I’m really milking the most out of these little bit parts,” the actor says with a laugh. In just a few years, Carrigan has turned literal instances of scene-stealing into a personal signature. Unicorn deploys his gifts deftly: He’s mostly silently reacting until, more than halfway into the movie, his character’s sneaky Scottish accent really reveals itself. This is an actor who’s learned how to calibrate a supporting performance.

The Massachusetts native didn’t grow up as the most obvious candidate to run away with star-studded comic films and series. He has alopecia, which caused hair loss from an early age; as a kid, he felt shy and reluctant to express himself. He hated making eye contact. But Carrigan’s first experience in children’s theater showed him how to channel that insecurity. “I wanted to be an actor, but I also didn’t want people to notice my alopecia. It created this interesting schism,” Carrigan says. “It took a while to actually get to the point where I was okay with being seen.”

That happened well after Carrigan decided to pursue acting, going on to graduate from Carnegie Mellon’s drama school. When he first started going on auditions, he felt lost, somewhere between his own strengths as an actor and what he assumed casting directors were looking for. “It’s just the absolute worst, in part because it’s a big trap to try to give them what they want,” he says. “It’s almost designed that way.” Around the time he turned 30, he reached a breakthrough when going out for a bruiser-villain role on The CW’s TV version of The Flash. He remembers it as the first time he decided to embrace his condition and go completely hairless for a role. “It was a real risk for me to take that leap and try,” he says. “I was so convinced that anyone who saw my alopecia would immediately reject me.”

On one hand, great reviews started coming in. On the other, his fear wasn’t totally unfounded. People in several corners of the internet told Carrigan that he should quit acting: peers he admired, producers, even casting directors. “Especially as a young actor, it can be very discombobulating, because you hold the people who are looking after you in very high esteem,” he says. “I was told that I wasn’t attractive anymore. You begin to see very clearly just what it is that people are projecting onto you. It became quite clear to me that I was seeing the limitation of their vision and their scope.”

Though the feedback was sometimes cruel, it actually freed Carrigan up. In auditions, he stopped worrying about what the room wanted from him. “The trick is you actually have to take the ball away from them and you have to show them your version,” he says. “It might not be the right thing for them, but it’s going to be unique. It’s going to be different—and you’ll have made it your own.” Carrigan’s wild take on the Batman villain Victor Zsasz in Gotham proved a prime example. In his mind, the character—very loosely drawn from the comics—was “an exercise in going in whatever direction I felt like in any given moment.” It helped that Victor was completely out of his mind.

The performance resonated as terrifying, hilarious, and endlessly unpredictable. And yet its roots, for Carrigan, were deeply personal. “The way that I would look at people as Victor Zsasz was my version of how people used to look at me and see a spot on my head or an eyebrow missing,” he says. “You go from someone who’s looking at you as a person to, then, someone who’s looking at you as a thing.”

Intended as a guest spot, Carrigan kept getting invited back, ultimately appearing in 20 episodes across most of Gotham’s five seasons. It’s not the last time a one-off turned into something much more for Carrigan.