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Actors are always doing things to prove they aren't too vain to serve their roles -- gaining a bunch of weight, losing a bunch of weight, getting bad haircuts or fake braces or walking around Los Angeles with an extremely droopy fake scrotum hanging out one leg of their short shorts. (Not all of the above apply to Renée Zellweger, by the way.) But even so, it takes a particularly confident, secure actor to take on the challenge of playing a character whose name you can't even remember afterward because everyone just keeps calling him "The Ugly Guy." We certainly couldn't handle that -- it would be like making a movie set in a thirteen-year-old's tortured subconscious! It would be like living through a shoot where everyone keeps reminding you what they'd write about you in a slam book! It would make you have to call your mom every day just so she could reassure you that she thinks you're lovely, and anyone who doesn't isn't really your friend! It would not just suck, it would super-suck!

Anyway, as you've probably figured out by now, Kevin Corrigan did play a dude generally referred to as "The Ugly Guy" in Walking And Talking, the really quite excellent first film from Nicole Holofcener; if you thought Lovely & Amazing was slight and Friends With Money a plotless excuse to let Jennifer Aniston get molested by Scott Caan: fair points, but you should still watch Walking And Talking, really. Though the main plot concerns a female friendship, and what happens to it when one of the women gets engaged, there is a subplot in which the single one, Amelia (Catherine Keener), finally agrees to go out with Bill, a video-store clerk she calls "The Ugly Guy" behind his back. Bill is not styled, perhaps, to his best advantage, but he is gentle and interesting (he's fascinated by movie monster makeup, but is also writing a book about Colette!). Amelia invites him back to her place eventually, which is where, unbeknownst to her, he overhears a message Laura (Anne Heche) leaves on Amelia's answering machine -- including his unfortunate nickname. He stops pursuing Amelia...who by then has become besotted with his beautiful skin and starts stalking him (badly). He finally tells her he knows she calls him "The Ugly Guy," and she feels bad, but time heals their relationship as video-store customer and clerk, which finally has a perfect dénouement in his acknowledging, with an appreciative eyebrow waggle, her rental of several porn videos. Anyway, regardless of the "Ugly Guy" ugliness, it probably wouldn't have worked out: Amelia is a sensitive sort who's destroyed when her cat jumps to her death out a window, whereas Bill's next girlfriend is into dwarf bowling. You're just not going to bridge a gap that wide with a shared affinity for French feminist novelists, you know?

Once "The Ugly Guy" had burned himself onto our brains, we started seeing him everywhere -- proving his cred in New York hipster-fests like Henry Fool and Kicked In The Head, selling horrendous fake IDs on Freaks & Geeks, trying to make a little decent coin in the backgrounds of Bad Boys and the abortion that was the Cedric The Entertainer vehicle The Honeymooners, sticking close to Steve Buscemi in Living In Oblivion, Trees Lounge, and Buscemi's latest directorial effort, Lonesome Jim. He got to romance Natasha Lyonne on screen -- back when that still meant something, and she wasn't a weird junkie getting sad songs written about her by Rufus Wainwright -- in Slums Of Beverly Hills; that was also his chance to prove that one can never have too many Charles Manson t-shirts. That's also him, looking about eleven, playing Ray Liotta's wheelchair-bound brother Michael in GoodFellas; maybe if Liotta's Henry Hill had spent less of his energy lecturing Michael about stirring the tomato sauce and more making sure his babysitter/drug mule understood why she must not use his home phone to confirm her illicit travel plans, he wouldn't be eating egg noodles and ketchup like a schmuck.

Director Martin Scorsese must have really loved the way Corrigan stirred that sauce, though, because this week the two unite again in The Departed. Our boy's name appears fairly far down the cast list, but given that the story is set in Boston's Irish mob, we can imagine which side of the law Corrigan's character is on. The guy is sometimes credited as Kevin Fitzgerald Corrigan, for Christ's sake, maybe just to make sure you don't think he's one of those Albanian Corrigans. Even more exciting (to us) than Corrigan's supporting role in an Oscar hopeful is ABC's forthcoming sitcom The Knights Of Prosperity, starring Donal Logue, another Irishman whose brother Corrigan played on Grounded For Life. We've seen the Knights pilot and it's quite endearing -- it's like the love child of My Name Is Earl and Smith -- and given that it involves the efforts of a band of nitwits trying to rob Mick Jagger's apartment, there is certainly room for one more messy-haired fuckup in the roster, and if the show gets killed before Kevin Corrigan can do at least one guest shot, our thoughts about the management at ABC will be so ugly they'll make The Ugly Guy look like Cillian Murphy.