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Peter MacNicol (born April 10, 1954, in Dallas, Texas) is an American actor whose career spans stage, film, and television across more than four decades. He is best known to television audiences as the eccentric lawyer John Cage on Ally McBeal (1997-2002), a role that earned him a Primetime Emmy Award in 2001,1 and to Ghostbusters fans as Janosz Poha, the art restorer turned servant of Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters II (1989).
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MacNicol was born the youngest of five children in Dallas, Texas. His father, John MacNicol, began his professional life as a corporate executive and later became an Episcopal priest; his mother Barbara was a homemaker.1 MacNicol studied drama at the University of Minnesota and launched his professional stage career at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, where he performed from 1978 to 1979 in productions including Hamlet and The Pretenders.1
He made his Off-Broadway debut in Crimes of the Heart in 1980. The production transferred to Broadway in 1981, where MacNicol received a Theatre World Award for his performance.1 It was during the Broadway run that a casting agent noticed him and brought him in to read for what would become the role of Stingo in Sophie's Choice.
MacNicol's feature film debut came in the fantasy adventure Dragonslayer (1981), in which he played the lead role of Galen opposite Sir Ralph Richardson.1 The following year he appeared in Sophie's Choice (1982) alongside Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, playing Stingo, a young Southern writer who witnesses and becomes entangled in the tragic story at the heart of the film. The performance established him as a serious dramatic actor and remains among his most critically recognized work.
His subsequent film work ranged widely. He played Gary Granger, the put-upon camp counselor, in Addams Family Values (1993), appeared as Thomas Renfield in Mel Brooks's comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), and played David Langley, the bumbling American minder of Mr. Bean, in Bean (1997). Later film credits include Battleship (2012) and Shell (2024), in which he played Dr. Thaddeus Brand.
Television became the primary arena for some of MacNicol's most sustained work. He appeared as attorney Alan Birch across multiple seasons of the medical drama Chicago Hope (1994-1998) before landing the role that defined his television career: John Cage, a profoundly neurotic and brilliantly idiosyncratic lawyer, on Ally McBeal (Fox, 1997-2002). The character's relentless nervous tics, phobias, and off-kilter courtroom theatrics were a natural fit for MacNicol's comedic instincts. He received Emmy nominations for the role in 1999 and 2000, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2001.1
He subsequently played physicist Dr. Larry Fleinhardt, a recurring and eventually series-regular character, across five seasons of the CBS crime drama Numb3rs (2005-2010), and appeared as national security advisor Tom Lennox in season six of 24 (2007). He joined the cast of Veep in 2016, playing the imperious political fixer Jeff Kane through the series finale in 2019. His voice work includes Doctor Octopus in the animated series The Spectacular Spider-Man (2008-2009) and the Mad Hatter in the Batman: Arkham video game series (2011-2015). He voiced Nigel the Advisor in Tangled: The Series (2017-2020). More recently, he appeared as Judge Campbell in the legal drama All Rise (2020-2021) and as Judge Robert DeLancie in the CBS legal series All's Fair (2025).
When MacNicol received the script for Ghostbusters II, the character of Janosz (originally named Jason) was, in his assessment, a generic supporting villain: "Twelve thousand guys could have played it."2 He had reached a point in his career where he could not keep turning down everything sent to him, but he was determined to find a way in. The key, he decided, was the Vlad the Impaler painting that his character was restoring at the Manhattan Museum of Art. If Janosz shared a heritage with the painting's subject, it would give the character a reason to be in thrall to Vigo the Carpathian. MacNicol made Janosz Carpathian and invented what he called an "impossible accent," blending the speech patterns of a Czech friend and a Romanian tourist-agency agent he had encountered.3
He auditioned with director Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis and delivered the full Balkanized performance, unsure whether the bold choice had won them over or cost him the part. He returned home to find a callback message waiting. At the callback he discovered that other actors had also adopted accents after learning that was what the producers were looking for, and that he was competing against at least one actor who was actually from Slovenia. He secured the role.2
The blackout scene in which the possessed Janosz walks a hallway with his eyes glowing was created in two passes. MacNicol first walked the dimly lit set, moving his head from side to side. Cinematographer Michael Chapman then made a second pass, walking the same route while holding a 2K lamp at MacNicol's eye level and panning it side to side. The two passes were edited together and Chapman and the light source were matted out. Special effects coordinator Pat Meyers added shards and particulate matter in the light beams so they would appear to track from Janosz's eyes to pools of light on the walls.4
For the sequence in which Janosz kidnaps Oscar while disguised as a nanny, MacNicol was dressed in drag and filmed against a bluescreen at ILM for close-up shots. The extended arm stretching from the carriage was achieved with a piece of tubing covered in costume fabric, rigged to slide down a pole. Wider shots used a miniature rod puppet and buggy manipulated by character performers Bob Cooper and David Allen, again photographed against a bluescreen.4
The creators of Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) intended to include Janosz Poha but abandoned the plan after they were unable to secure MacNicol's participation. The character was written out of the project.
MacNicol has been married to Martha Cumming since 1986.1
Some content on this page was researched using the Ghostbusters Wiki on Fandom.
"Peter MacNicol," Wikipedia, accessed 2026-06-13, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_MacNicol. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7
Ghostbusters News, "Peter MacNicol Talks About Auditioning for Ghostbusters II and the Origin of Janosz Poha's Accent" (October 22, 2025), https://ghostbustersnews.com/2025/10/22/peter-macnicol-talks-about-auditioning-for-ghostbusters-ii-and-the-origin-of-janosz-pohas-accent/. ↩ ↩2
Bernard, Jami (November 1989). "Who? Me a Villain?" Starlog #148, p. 31. Starlog Group, New York NY USA. ↩
Eisenberg, Adam (November 1989). "Ghostbusters Revisited," Cinefex #40. Cinefex, USA. ↩ ↩2