10 Best TV Guest Appearances Of All Time
Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel.
These 10 guest appearances are some of the best you can find on television. Guest characters, guest actors, and guest appearances can be a little trickier to define than you might think. Major awards bodies give out guest acting awards annually, but those winners might be listed as a recurring character on IMDb or Wikipedia.
Then there's the spirit of the category. Someone can come into a series for an entire season as a major player, only to disappear quickly, and still be considered a guest. Someone can appear once a season, from start to finish, and still be a guest. This list considers who makes the most out of the limited time they are given.
Philip Baker Hall As Lt. Joe Bookman
Seinfeld (1991,1998)
Philip Baker Hall only appears in only two episodes of Seinfeld, but he immediately rises to the top of the packed list of great Seinfeld characters. Hall plays Lt. Joe Bookman in "The Library", and then reprises the role for the guest character-packed finale episode of the series.
Lt. Bookman is a hard-nosed private detective whose primary concern is making sure that people who check out books from the library return them on time. It's like if Detective Joe Friday from Dragnet suddenly appeared in an episode of Seinfeld. Few guest characters have completely altered the tone of a Seinfeld episode quite like the late Hall.
Albert Brooks As Hank Scorpio
The Simpsons (1996)
The sheer amount of guest characters in The Simpsons makes them hard to rank, but it's hard to deny that Hank Scorpio, voiced by Albert Brooks, isn't at least in the top five. Hank appears in season 8, episode 2, "You Only Move Twice" as the owner of the Globex Corporation, who hires Homer and invites his family to move to the idyllic Cypress Creek.
It turns out that Hank is actually an evil mastermind in the style of a James Bond villain, but Homer never notices, even after Hank asks that he kill a few people on his way out after resigning. Every line out of Scorpio's mouth is brilliant, made better by Brooks' delivery, but "You ever see a guy say good-bye to a shoe?" may be the best.
Annabella Sciorra As Gloria Trillo
The Sopranos (2001-2004)
To be a guest character on The Sopranos usually means you're going to die at the hands of some mobster, but Gloria Trillo (Annabella Sciorra) upends expectations to the very end. When Tony (James Gandolfini) meets the beautiful Gloria in the waiting room of Dr. Melfi's office, that should have been the first sign things were not going to work out between the two.
On the surface, Gloria is a classy, professional, successful woman, but that exterior hides a darkness that Tony is quickly exposed to. Depressed, suicidal, and anxious, Gloria proves to be more than a match for Tony in every way, and Sciorra's antic, mesmerizing performance is a heartbreaking portrait of someone struggling against their own demons.
Keith Carradine As "Wild Bill" Hickok
Deadwood (2004)
Keith Carradine appears in five episodes of Deadwood as James Butler Hickok, better known as "Wild Bill". The famous gunslinger sets off the events of the series with his death soon into it. At this point in time, Wild Bill is past his prime and is weary of his life. He hopes to end it in Deadwood through gambling, drinking, or both.
It's a powerful performance from Carradine and a critical one for Deadwood. His presence in the first few episodes and friendship with Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) lends an emotional weight to the start of the series that carries through three seasons. His haunted look throughout his appearances is a reminder of the true cost of life in the old West.
Margo Martindale As Mags Bennett
Justified (2011)
Margo Martindale is the queen of guest characters, as noted by Todd (Aaron Paul) in BoJack Horseman, who always refers to her as "Character actress Margo Martindale". He has a point; Martindale has made a career of coming into a TV show for only a few episodes, and stealing every scene she's in.
Martindale has an extended guest appearance in Justified as Mags Bennett in season 2. Mags is the primary antagonist of the season as the matriarch of the Bennett clan, a family of pot dealers who have a feud with another family of weed growers. Grim and strong, Martindale makes it clear that Mags is someone not to be messed with, but who would rather be doing anything else if she could.
Riz Ahmed As Paul-Louis
Girls (2017)
Riz Ahmed has a brief but memorable role in Girls as Paul-Louis in season 6. When Hannah (Lena Dunham) goes to the Hamptons to report on a surf camp, she finds herself completely uninterested in her assigned task. What she does find interesting is the handsome but air-headed surf instructor, Paul-Louis.
Paul-Louis is a complete caricature of the "surfer bro", "easygoing, cool guy" archetype, the kind that Hannah never gets with, and he manages to make him likeable. Ahmed plays Paul-Louis with a careful balance of boring and fascinating, and he's the perfect character to segue Hannah into the next stage of her life.
Rainer Bock As Werner Ziegler
Better Call Saul (2018)
Leave it to Vince Gilligan to make the best B-plot in a show about drug dealers and the lawyers that represent them, be about a German engineer and his efforts to check in with his wife. Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock) is a tragic and heartbreaking character, and one whose death marks a major turning point in the franchise.
When Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) decides to build his massive underground meth lab, he and Mike (Jonathan Banks) hire Werner and his team of German engineers to build it. Werner is highly capable and careful, but he doesn't quite fully understand just how evil people can be in this meth business he has become a part of.
Harriet Walter As Caroline Collingwood
Succession (2018-2023)
Caroline Collingwood (Harriet Walter) is one or two appearances away from being a recurring character, and while that would mean she couldn't go on this list, the tradeoff would be worth it to see more of the Roy's mother. Caroline, mother to Ken (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), and first wife to Logan (Brian Cox), is as icy and devilishly charming as you may expect.
She is the perfect upper-class English mother who has kept her children at an arm's length their whole lives, then has the nerve to chastize them for not getting closer to her. Walter's physical and facial acting is incredible; her scene at Logan's funeral when she realized Shiv is pregnant is a startlingly real and shockingly funny moment. "Exactly."
Nick Offerman As Bill
The Last Of Us (2023)
The best episode of The Last of Us is the third episode of season 1, "Long, Long Time", and it has the least to do with the main plot of the series. Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett take the lead roles from Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as Bill (Offerman) and Frank (Bartlett), two men who find comfort and safety in one another in the middle of an apocalypse.
Offerman edges Bartlett out by a hair as the best thing about the episode, mostly because we get to see so many different sides of the character. The survivalist version of Bill we see at the beginning of the episode will be familiar to anyone who has seen Parks and Recreation, but his tender, loving side is something we haven't seen, and it's done generously and movingly.
Olivia Colman As Andrea Terry
The Bear (2023-2024)
The Bear frequently uses big-name actors to score surprise points, and it often pulls it off. The best of these guest appearances comes in one of the show's best episodes, "Forks", with Olivia Colman as Chef Andrea Terry. Chef Terry trained Carmie (Jeremy Allen White), offering him the gentle and firm guidance he excelled best under.
In "Forks", she appears to help Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) cut mushrooms and dispenses some easy, kind wisdom. Chef Terry appears a few more times throughout the television series, and though she's often talked about in hushed, worshipful tones, Colman plays her like a down-to-earth cook, just one with a lot of charm and even more talent.
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