Rise to Fame
By 17, he'd already played Peter Van Daan opposite Natalie Portman in the Broadway revival of The Diary of Anne Frank. That legitimacy didn't translate when American Pie arrived in 1999. As Finch, the pretentious intellectual who gets pranked with laxatives and ends up sleeping with Stifler's mom, he became the deadpan punchline of one of the decade's defining teen comedies. He played it completely flat, and that's exactly why it worked. Four films stretched across 13 years.
In the Spotlight
While most of his American Pie castmates stayed in the franchise orbit through the 2000s, he built a parallel television career that didn't depend on nostalgia. Scorpion gave him 93 episodes on CBS as a Harvard-trained psychiatrist with a gambling addiction. When that ended in 2018, he kept moving: a lead role in the Off-Broadway play The Wanderers alongside Katie Holmes in 2023 (the Wall Street Journal called it the finest play of that year), a recurring role in the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and a continuing voice part in American Dad!. Finch is still the name people recognize, but the career didn't stop there.
Side Notes
His actual name is Edward Kovelsky. The stage name came before American Pie, before the diarrhea scene made him famous. He started acting at 7, logged years of New York stage work, and had an understudy credit at Lincoln Center by 12. The Harold & Kumar role came without an audition, offered directly. Off set, he competes in high-stakes poker tournaments and advocates for environmental causes. Neither hobby fits the Finch character at all, which is either a coincidence or a very deliberate distance from it.