Dean Norris

The Harvard degree is the detail people always do a double take on. Norris graduated in 1985 with a social studies degree, trained at RADA, then spent a decade playing exactly the kind of guys who wouldn't have made it past the admissions essay: cops, soldiers, federal agents. Lethal Weapon 2, Total Recall, Terminator 2 -- always the authority figure, never the lead. Breaking Bad finally gave him a character worth inhabiting. Hank Schrader started as the show's comic relief and ended as its moral center, the one figure in Walter White's orbit who never compromised. That arc from DEA blowhard to tragic hero is the underappreciated emotional spine of the whole series.

Post-Breaking Bad, he's been the reliable veteran cycling through prestige TV: villain on Under the Dome, eccentric on Claws, Elliot Stabler's brother on Law & Order: Organized Crime, where he got promoted to series regular when the show moved to Peacock in 2024. He's not a household name the way his Breaking Bad castmates are, but the work hasn't stopped. The parts keep coming because he brings exactly what the brief asks for, whether the role is sympathetic or reprehensible, without the overhead of a leading-man persona to manage.

He went to Harvard, which is either the most counterintuitive or most logical fact about a man who built a career playing DEA agents and military officers. He majored in social studies and followed it with training at RADA. He's given himself the nickname the "Alphabet Actor" for accumulating roles across nearly every law enforcement agency acronym in the business. He and his wife Bridget opened the Norris Performing Arts Center in Murrieta, California in 2018 -- a generous use of money earned mostly by playing authority figures in other people's stories.