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Even aside from his exciting new role in Ozark, the future is looking bright for Pelphrey, 38. While the status of any upcoming movies are up in the air right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pelphrey is signed on and playing a key role in David Fincher's first movie since Gone Girl, the biopic Mank. In that movie, he'll play Joseph Mankiewicz, the son of Herman Mankiewicz, screenwriter of Citizen Kane.

Pelphrey has been an intriguing actor for a while, though, and below we get into the weeds at how he got to this point.

He played a Marvel Villain.

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It's a pretty universally accepted fact that Iron Fist was the weakest of the Netflix Marvel Universe series (which also included Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Punisher, and The Defenders), but Pelphrey's character in the series, Ward Meachem, was one of the few redeeming qualities. Pelphrey played him as sort of a buttoned-up, corporate type of villainthink Ben Mendelsohn in The Dark Knight Rises or Robert Redford in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

He's also showed up in a few other exciting projects.

Before Pelphrey was in Ozark or even Iron Fist, he had a small role in Banshee, a crime drama that aired on Cinemax to strong reviews. His character on Banshee is Kurt Bunker, a police deputy who was once a neo-nazi skinhead in another life. With this edgy character, you can see a little bit of the DNA that ended up transferring into his role as Ben Davis on Ozark.

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Pelphrey has also played roles in single-episode plots on a lot of other TV shows you've heard of before, too. He's been on an episode of Blindspot, an episode of The Following, an episode of The Good Wife, and has even played two separate characters in Law and Order: SVU. He's worked around the TV dial for sure, and seems to have really made his way up the ranks to the point of gaining bigger and bigger roles as time has passed.

He was also a soap opera mainstay.

For 6 years and 163 episodes between 2003 and 2009, Pelphrey played a character named Jonathan Randall on Guiding Light. His character did all the things you would probably expect a soap character to do in that lengthy a period: get in trouble with girls, fight with just about every other character, try to kill his own mother, and, yes, die in a car explosion (which he would eventually return from. Don't ask). Pelphrey also appeared on As The World Turns between 2009 and 2010, but a much shorter runonly 26 episodes.

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