Peter MacNicol
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Peter MacNicol (born April 10, 1954, in Dallas, Texas) is an American actor known for a wide range of stage, film, and television work across four decades. He studied drama at the University of Minnesota and began his professional career at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, earning a Theatre World Award for his 1981 Broadway debut in Crimes of the Heart.
MacNicol appeared in Ghostbusters II (1989) as Janosz Poha, the obsessive art restorer at the Manhattan Museum of Art who falls under the sway of Vigo the Carpathian. To build the character, MacNicol devised a distinctive accent by blending the speech patterns of a Czech friend and a Romanian tourist-agency agent, then auditioned with director Ivan Reitman and Harold Ramis. The creators of the Ghostbusters video game later wanted to bring Janosz back but were unable to secure MacNicol's participation, and the character was written out of that project.
Among his best-known film roles are Galen in Dragonslayer (1981) and Stingo in Sophie's Choice (1982). On television, he won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2001 for his portrayal of the eccentric lawyer John Cage on Ally McBeal (1997-2002). He also appeared as physicist Dr. Larry Fleinhardt across five seasons of the CBS crime drama Numb3rs (2005-2010) and as Tom Lennox in season six of 24.