Anthony Carrigan’s ‘Barry’ bad guy
Noho has a taste for subs and pop culture.
Chechen mobster plus people pleaser equals one unique thug.
And one scene-stealing breakout role for Anthony Carrigan, 35, who plays the delightfully exasperating crime family lieutenant Noho Hank in HBO’s critically acclaimed dark comedy Barry (Sundays, 10:30 ET/PT).
Noho “means well. He just happens to live a life of organized crime. So, that’s business,” Carrigan says. “But if he can make a few friends along the way, then that’s all good by him.”
With his insatiable interest in pop culture, lilting accent and personality that’s equal parts innocence and ignorance, Hank offers comic relief in an increasingly dark comedy. Carrigan, best known as a very different criminal, Victor Zsasz, in Fox’s Gotham, holds his own in a cast that includes Bill Hader, Henry Winkler and Stephen Root.
Noho and his Chechen boss, Goran Pazar (Glenn Fleshler), make a Laurel and Hardy tag team, running a criminal enterprise and ordering assassinations — while offering submarine sandwiches and babka — from Goran’s suburban Los Angeles home. Noho “loves America. He wants to be American pretty badly, so he learns all the slang,” Carrigan says. “He wants to create a new life for himself that he can be proud of.”
Enter Hader’s Barry, a dour, Midwestern hit man and a paragon of professionalism compared with the Chechens. Noho, whose fascination with gadgetry threatens the operation, lacks Barry’s skills and temperament, raising the question of how he has survived to this point.
“I don’t think he necessarily makes the best decisions he possibly could,” Carrigan says.
Noho takes a shine to Barry, who privately questions his line of work and becomes consumed with the acting class his target attends. “Hank wants to be friends with Barry, so he checks in with him to make sure everything is going well,” even if that means interrupt- ing Barry’s sniper stakeout with a chatty phone call, Carrigan says.
The character is a new kind of bad guy for Carrigan, who has played his share of sinister types, including
Gotham’s “drastically different” Zsasz, who most recently appeared in March. “I find Noho Hank to be very pleasant and optimistic, whereas Victor Zsasz is a bit more of a, you know, psychopath.”
As for Hank’s infectious sing-songy accent and cadence, Carrigan, who has a Serbian girlfriend, says he “winged it” for his audition but had professional help when the show started filming. “We ended up doing a lot of improv, and you have to know what you’re doing if you’re going to go off script. We wanted to make sure we weren’t all over the place with the accents.”
Carrigan credits his bad-guy roles partly to baldness, which stems from alopecia, an autoimmune condition that causes complete hair loss. He wishes he hadn’t tried to hide the condition earlier in his career.
“I’ve had a lot of people who have alopecia say: ‘Wow! That’s so cool. I haven’t seen anyone with alopecia on television. Thanks for spreading your message,’ ” he says. “I wish I could have gone back and told myself what I know now: Accepting yourself is the way to go.”