Please Stop Trusting This Man

There’s a moment in Peacock’s brilliant All Her Fault where the whole show pivots, and every warm, supportive thing Jake Lacy’s Peter Irvine has done for eight episodes turns on its head. It only works because of who’s playing him. Lacy has quietly become the most dependable guy in television for a very specific kind of role — so good at it that his casting now practically works as a spoiler these days. He’s the guy you’d give a gentle “hey, buddy old pal!” shot on the shoulder, right before he turns around and decks you.

To understand why he’s so good at it, you have to remember when he wasn’t. Lacy started out as a nice guy. He was Pete on the last season of The Office — “Plop,” per Andy Bernard — the sweet rebound for Erin, the watered-down final-season Jim-and-Pam. He was the decent one-night stand in Obvious Child. But he was also Fran on Girls, the sensible teacher Hannah dates to get her life together, before the show let us clock the passive-aggressive control hiding under all that reasonableness. That one was the giveaway.

Shane Patton in The White Lotus is where Lacy found his lane — the entitled newlywed waging total war over a hotel room, so wounded that the universe wouldn’t bow to him. He won an Emmy, and his career took off on a run of roles that all ask the same question: What if a lovable Paul Rudd or Chris Messina or Greg Kinnear type were actually a monster? What if the romcom face was hiding Brad Pitt on an airplane with his kids?

So the doors flew open: the kidnapper next door in A Friend of the Family, the smug rich son in Apples Never Fall, and now, eight months apart, two roles that basically mirror each other — Peter in All Her Fault and Marshall in Furious.

The thing about these roles is that Lacy never plays the leering creep or the mustache-twirling villain (a mustache would ruin his whole vibe). He plays something worse: the man who genuinely cannot fathom that he might be the problem, and who’s made himself indispensable to a woman by seeming safe. The man that is giving stepfather.

In All Her Fault, Peter isn’t just charming, he’s a wife guy — the secure choice, the opposite of all those broken men women are always trying to fix. And that’s the trap! The safe pick turns out to be the complete asshole. He’s the good husband, the reliable one, the guy who holds the door and smiles as you walk into hell.

In Furious, he’s the same guy with the mask already off, which is arguably the harder trick. We know Marshall’s an abuser from jump; the show doesn’t hide it. And Lacy’s still doing fine, uncomfortable work, because he makes you get why Emmy Rossum’s Alice fell for this man and why she keeps half-buying his lies. He’s fluent in remorse — the apology you actually want to believe. I know he’s lying, and part of me still wants to believe him. Then you remember nobody gets that good at being sorry without a lot of practice.

Put those two roles back-to-back and there you have it: Jake Lacy, the definitive screen face of the guy who will never, under any circumstances, consider that he’s the bad guy — whether he’s hiding behind the perfect-husband bit or laundering it through contrition. It’s the fear our culture is gnawing on right now: that the real danger was never the guy tripping the alarms, but the one who convinced you that you didn’t need them in the first place. Nobody plays it better, and it’s only a matter of time before he’s cast as the perfect distillation of it: Mark Zuckerberg.

Beware of this man.