Kyle Gallner

About

Kyle Gallner has spent the better part of two decades being the most interesting person in rooms that are trying very hard to kill him. He built his television foundations quietly -- a nervy, tightly wound Cassidy in Veronica Mars, where the performance sat just the right side of uncomfortable -- and then horror came calling and found him more than ready. What he does in that genre is worth watching closely. In The Haunting in Connecticut he anchors the dread rather than reacting to it, sick and frightened but grounded. Jennifer's Body lets him play the lonely, desperate, slightly ridiculous kid with real sympathy. In Smile he is essentially the audience's escort into catastrophe, and he keeps the thing believable by staying rattled without ever becoming hysterical. Red State uses him differently -- disposable, panicked -- and he makes even that brief exposure count. Then there is Strange Darling, which asks him to do something more structurally daring entirely, and he handles the fractured chronology with a physicality that does the explaining his character cannot always do in words. Dinner in America is the softest of the bunch -- a punk romance requiring genuine comic lightness -- and Gallner brings it without dropping his edge. He is a young sharp cheese that keeps surprising: the rind looks straightforward enough, but the interior has more complexity than the packaging suggests, and each role leaves a slightly different finish.