12 Underrated Actors with Shocking Stories to Tell

Best known for roles like Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day or Max in Thelma and Louise, Stephen Tobolowsky has been appearing in movies and TV since the 1970s. 

At one point early in his career he was doing local theater in Hartford, CT, when he got into two life-threatening altercations in on week. First, a man pulled a gun on him in a bar. Two days later, another man stabbed him in a pizza parlor. 

Frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator and German-Austrian actor Christoph Waltz is known for playing menacing villains, like the Nazi fugitive hunter Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds. However, this is just one portion of his show business career. 

Waltz grew up in Vienna, where his father was a composer and conductor, and as a teenager he attended at least two operas a week. While pursuing his acting career, Waltz also decided to pursue directing operas to feed his “obsession” with music. 

In 2013, Waltz directed Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Belgium's Opera Vlaanderen. Four years later, he returned there to direct Verdi's Falstaff. In 2020, he directed Beethoven's Fidelio at his hometown venue, Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. When directing opera, Waltz insists his performers use a realistic and grounded style more commonly found in theater and film. 

The Departed and The Conjuring franchise star Vera Farmiga was born in New Jersey, but her family hails from the Ukraine. Farmiga grew up in a Ukrainian immigrant community and didn't speak English until attending first grade at age six.

In her teens, Farmiga participated in a Ukrainian folk dancing troupe, which was allowed to tour Ukraine shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Farmiga describes the dance as a cross between Irish step dancing and Cossack kick dancing. She still occasionally indulges in it when she’s had a few drinks.

Sam Rockwell has turned up in dozens of comedies and dramas over his career, which includes an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He also suffered a serious hand injury in a car accident, which required a total reconstruction of his appendage. 

Here’s how he described it to Esquire: 

I flipped a car. I think the same thing sort of happened to Shia LaBeouf, except his hand was hurt worse than mine, but my fingers were crushed and then reconstructed.

New Zealander Melanie Lynskey's breakout role was in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, and since then she's appeared in dozens of TV series from Yellowjackets to The Last of Us to Castle Rock. 

As her husband Jason Ritter revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Lynskey also suffers from misophonia, which is specific sounds are perceived more intensely. For Lynskey, the worst sound is smacking lips. "They hear it 20 times louder than you do and it drives them insane," Ritter explained. 

Los Angeles-born actor James Cromwell’s resume spans nearly 200 credits, including a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination for his role as Farmer Hoggett in 1995’s Babe. Cromwell also comes from a show business family with a dark past. 

His mother Kay Johnson, an actress, was married to his father John Cromwell, who directed films like Of Human Bondage, Algiers, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Although the older Cromwell was a liberal Democrat he was no communist. He did, however, have a contract with RKO Pictures, which he signed weeks before Howard Hughes purchased the movie studio in 1948. 

Hughes, an avowed anti-communist, later passed along Cromwell’s name to the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The accusation was false, but Cromwell was blacklisted until 1959. 

The elder Cromwell's experiences inspired Robert to a lifetime of activism. Among many other projects, he’s participated in a legal defense of the Black Panthers, and he’s campaigned for animal right - inspired by his experiences filming Babe.