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Though we at Fametracker have yet to establish a Hey! It's That Guy! Hall of Fame (complete with a bronze statue of J.T. Walsh out front), when we finally do get around to it, Dylan Baker will be one of our first honorees. He's got the classic HITG! face, his features symmetrical, if unmemorable. The more often you see him, the more you may start to find a strange beauty in his pale Irish skin and wry smile, but he's not getting cast as a dreamboat; his oeuvre is made up, almsot exclusively, of roles in the Average White Guy mold.

Baker is fortunate to look the part of the upper-middle-class everyman, since there is no paucity of such roles in major Hollywood productions; at the tender age of forty-two, he's already racked up a list of credits that outnumber his years on earth. His neutral features even lend themselves to period pictures: stick a pair of chunky Clark Kent eyeglasses on him and he's right at home in the Kennedy White House. Like any Hey! It's That Guy! worth his salt, Baker's played an array of army guys (even period army guys, as in The Last of the Mohicans), cops, doctors, lawyers, and politicians; he also possesses the requisite mix of gravitas, patience, and moral rectitude to have played a couple of priests in his day, too.

The bad news (well, depending on how you look at it) is that Baker's ultra-neutral physiognomy means that, good as he is at playing an actual normal guy, he's even better at playing a seemingly normal guy whose unflappable exterior conceals all manner of depravity. Sometimes, he's just a little bit depraved -- as in Changing Lanes, earlier this year, in which he played the hacker who wiped out Samuel L. Jackson's credit rating. Sometimes, he's not even that depraved, but just a dick -- as in one episode of Northern Exposure, on which he guest-starred as Janine Turner's brother whose wife leaves him by the end of the hour.

And then there's Happiness. Leave it to writer-director Todd Solondz to create the ultimate Average White Guy With Unfathomable Depths of Depravity, a.k.a. Bill Maplewood. Baker takes this absolutely despicable character -- a suburban doctor cum pedophile who drugs and molests his sons' friends when they sleep over at his house -- and manages the seemingly impossible by making him sort of sympathetic. Though the audience is never on Maplewood's side (uh, obviously), Baker's performance is so thoughtful and compelling and tragic, even, that we are invested enough to want to follow his journey to its (inevitable) conclusion, rather than abandoning the movie midway through it in order to take a long, long shower. The movie is hardly the feel-good story of any year, and not one you'd probably want to watch more than once (we sure didn't), but the whole thing pretty much rests on Baker's ability to make the degenerate Maplewood a three-dimensional character, rather than a melodramatic monster, and Baker gives a brilliant, horrifying performance.

Baker's next role is as part of the scenery behind Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition. There may be a parallel universe in which the actor who brought Bill Maplewood to life would have won back-to-back Oscars while the one who portrayed Forrest Gump would be a lowly supporting player; sadly, that is not the universe in which we live.