Confirmed: Shea Whigham is in everything

If you've seen a movie and you didn't think Shea Whigham was in it, chances are you weren't looking hard enough.

Avengers: Infinity War? He's one of the Children of Thanos.

Halloween? That's him behind the Michael Myers mask.

A Quiet Place? One of the monsters.

Isle of Dogs? One of the dogs.

Crazy Rich Asians? Yes, he's in that too.

Don't try to disprove the theory because you will fail. Shea Whigham's IMDB page is a complete listing of all the films that have been made since he started working as an actor. And strangely, even some from before he was born.

Beirut, which I saw last night, was just the latest.

Why do you think he never has a lead role? It takes a lot of time to appear in every movie that's in production at any given time. The best way to accomplish it is to have between 12 and 20 lines of dialogue in each. Get you in and out as fast as they can.

Fortunately, I've heard that Whigham can nail all his scenes in one take. His fellow actors are paid an incentive to be at their absolute best in those scenes as well.

Then whooosh! He's gone.

That's part of the reason he plays the same kind of character in every movie. In order to accomplish these incredible feats, Whigham is in permanent method actor mode.

They asked Whigham if he would play Pennywise the Clown in last year's IT movie and he was like "Nope! No can do. Let me play one of the cops." So he did.

"Now Vance," you'll say. "There is an inconsistency in your argument. You just said Whigham always plays the same kind of roles, but above you talked about him playing a monster, an alien and a dog."

That's true, but did you notice how he played those roles with the same gruff, clipped, no nonsense manner that he plays those cops, government bureaucrats and low-level criminals? That one alien in A Quiet Place was, I thought, particularly to the point and decisive in his, you know, murdering of human beings.

When asked in a recent interview how long he thought he could keep this up, Whigham said "How long have you got?"

The reporter then raised the practical consideration that one day Whigham would die, at which point he could no longer appear in every movie every made. Whigham just laughed.

"You think I don't have a plan for that?" he said.

Clones. It's gotta be clones.