I think we’re all in agreement that the casting of Larry David in the lead of Woody Allen’s latest film Whatever Works is pure gold, Jerry. Well, maybe everyone aside from Larry David. “I’d always been a fan. … I asked him to do it, and he said, ‘But I can’t act! I can only do what I do, I’m not an actor, you’ll be disappointed,’” Allen told Sara Vilkomerson of the New York Observer. “You know, those are the ones who can always do it. The ones that tell you how great they are can never do it. Larry is all, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it,’ but when it came time to do it, right out of the box, he did it.”

It’s not that David leapt at the chance.

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It's no secret that the selection of a That Guy! is a highly personal thing. I play favorites in this space, and make no apologies. There's nothing objective about why I'll pick a Tom Atkins but eschew a Burt Young — it's as simple as one appealing to me on a certain level and the other leaving me as cold as a glass of raw eggs. Everyone has their preferences when it comes to character actors, and finding agreement on the subject is harder than getting a group of a dozen movie critics to agree on a Coen Brothers film. Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and if there's ever been anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Baker Hall, I've never met them (and they better hope I don't, particularly in a dark alley, and with a couple of boxes of Sno-Caps in me). It's astonishing to consider that Hall is seventy-six years old — not because he doesn't look it, with his worn, lined face, perpetually plastered-down hair and eyes that droop with a combination of sadness and intelligence — but because he's looked that way for at least twenty years. The common perception that he sprung into the world fully formed, like Athena, from the imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson, ignores a film career that goes back almost five decades — not that it wasn't largely worth ignoring before he crossed paths with Robert Altman, who gave him a role that would forever grant him one of the all-time great film performances in history even if he'd never made another movie.

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