Tom Mardirosian

A character actor who vanishes into his roles, Tom Mardirosian is best remembered from the gritty HBO dramas "Oz" and "The Wire." Mardirosian's love for acting began while in an Army Special Forces troop. After leaving the services, he headed back to his hometown of Buffalo, New York, where he began to appear in local theatre and studied drama at Buffalo's Studio ARENA Theatre School. Soon he headed downstate to work on Broadway, notably in "The Magic Show," a one-act musical starring magician Doug Henning. Soon he was appearing in small roles in feature films, notably as Officer Pantuzzi in the comedy "Trading Places" in 1983. Sporadic screen appearances lined his resume for the remainder of the 1980s, but it was in 1990 that his film career took off with a role as District Attorney Nico Della Guardia in the Harrison Ford paranoid thriller "Presumed Innocent." Soon further TV and screen parts poured in, and in 1998 he landed the key part of the childlike inmate Agamemnon Busmalis on HBO's prison drama "Oz." He portrayed the character from its second until its final sixth season. Now well-known to HBO's producers, he was swiftly snatched up for the part of corrupt FBI Agent Kristos Koutris on the second season of the network's multi-faceted crime drama "The Wire." For the rest of the 2000s Mardirosian dipped in and out of TV and feature film roles, memorably in M. Night Shyamalan's fantasy drama "Lady in the Water."