It’s a happy birthday to Timothy Olyphant, who turns 39 today, and has finally grown into the gauntness of his face. After some bit parts, Olyphant got his big break in 1997’s Scream sequel, and parlayed that into a steady diet of supporting work in movies like When Trumpets Fade, Go, Gone in Sixty Seconds and the like.

Olyphant has small eyes an angular face that breeds a certain wariness, if not outright distrust. He’s found a home on HBO’s Deadwood as Seth Bullock, and his snarl will no doubt be put to use effectively as the villain in this summer’s Live Free or Die Hard. A few attempts to subvert this image (as a wounded Jennifer Garner’s bad-boy boy-toy in Catch and Release, for instance) have fallen by the wayside, but where Olyphant should be concentrating his efforts at branching out is in comedy. He absolutely slayed in 2004’s The Girl Next Door, an underrated teen comedy that I’ll have to address in long-form re-posted review sometime soon. As a smarmy, spike-haired porn producer, Kelly, who gets locked into a battle of wills over a starlet with a high school student and would-be valedictorian (Emile Hirsch), Olyphant is charming and dangerous, amusingly recognizable and inherently unknowable at the same time.

Olyphant oozes charisma, displays crackerjack timing and knows how to sharpen a casual line into a dagger with pointed subtext. The problem, of course, is that he’s too big and athletic-looking (he was a college swimmer at USC) to play the wacky neighbor or sidekick, so there’s almost always going to be that grey lining to those types of characters that he gets offered. It’s a similar problem Billy Bob Thornton faced early in his career — translating that edginess into a more rakish magnetism. Here’s hoping Olyphant finds some screwy, fun character work soon. He’d be great in a noir, too — something canted and unhinged like Red Rock West — something that allowed his exasperation to poke through in subtle, mounting ways.