At its purest, acting is a wonderful game of fraud. If you're good enough to make a living at it, you show up to work every day and crawl under the skin of a stranger to yourself. You can be as harmless as a loving parent or as malicious as a cold-blooded killer. The job requires you to be a master of empathy; you may not like the person you're playing, but you have to understand them well enough to make their desires believable, if not relatable to your audience. It's a fun, terrifying high-wire act, and the deeper you get into it, the harder it can be to get out of character.

This, of course, depends on how you approach the craft. If you are a method trained actor like Robert DeNiroyou become your character. However, if you're a seasoned fabulist who prefers to play the short game, you can get in and out with little mental effort. Acting here is no different from lying. This approach still requires that essential sense of acting that all actors possess, but it can be disconcerting to an outsider because it lacks emotional purchase. One moment you're effortlessly tricking a married man into committing adultery, and an hour later you're out of character and going home for the day.

This sounds a bit like a private investigator, doesn't it? Would it surprise you to know that two of the most talented character actors of the last 30 years have ever been in the profession? Maybe not, but you'll be blown away when you find out which actors have made it big in the industry.

two weeks ago, comic book author Ryan Estrada went viral on Bluesky by informing his followers that Wayne Knight and Margot Martindale once supplemented their acting income by working for the same detective agency. yes, Newman from Seinfeld and Spells from "Justified" used their acting talents to potentially catch people being untruthful.

According to Knight, he took the gig as a side hustle so he wouldn't have to rely on unemployment. How did he fall into this line of work? As Knight told Vice in 2015:

“(I) waited tables like everyone else when I first started. And I had a friend who said, "Well, I have a job that you might be interested in." I go, "Yeah?" What is that? And he says, "I'm a private investigator." I go, "What?" You don't have a police background. Were you trained for this?' 'No'. "How did you get a job?" He says, “Well, they want to hire actors. Because they are usually intelligent, skilled, can play different roles and have no scruples."

Knight's delusional facility allowed him to hop on the phone and bust unfaithful spouses and, more ambitiously, corporate heads and high-ranking military men who wanted to make hay in the world of venture capitalism. He would use the moniker "Bill Monty" to maintain the deception as long as necessary and was successful enough that he has been trying to turn these experiences into a sitcom or movie for the past few decades.

As for Martindale, she was much less enamored with the gig. As he told Backstory in 2020"They hired a lot of actors. I didn't have a lot of interesting things to do, but it was all about curious information from trusted people about bounty hunters, about husbands who were jealous, about wives who looked gallantly at their husbands." She added that while the men occasionally went out in the field, the women were stuck working on the phones. If this lazy story could be made into a movie or series, I'd rather see it told from Martindale's perspective.