Wayne Knight

Wayne Knight spent the early '90s stacking up character parts in JFK and Basic Instinct before Seinfeld made him inescapable. He auditioned for George Costanza first and didn't get it, which turned out to be the better deal: Newman ran seven seasons and became one of TV's most quotable secondary characters. Steven Spielberg spotted him in Basic Instinct and cast him as Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park (1993), making him the first actor locked in for the film. The role gave him a second iconic death scene to go along with a career built on never quite being the star.

Knight has kept working into his seventies, taking supporting parts in Them (2024), Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2025), and That '90s Show. None of it generates headlines, which is how character actors age out without anyone noticing. The more honest measure of where he lands is the convention circuit, where he signs autographs as Newman and Dennis Nedry, two characters who peaked in the '90s and haven't stopped being referenced since. Thirty years of 'Hello, Newman' is a more durable legacy than most leads ever manage.

He left the University of Georgia in the early '70s to join a regional theater company in Virginia, and finally finished his BFA in 2008, roughly three decades after he started. In his early career he worked as a private detective between acting gigs. In 2014, a fake website claiming to be TMZ spread a story that he'd died in a car crash; when Knight addressed it, he spent more time expressing sympathy for the woman who actually did die in that accident than defending himself, which was a decent way to handle a bad situation.