Blair Underwood has been famous for roughly four decades, which in Hollywood years is basically three geological eras.
Law," he made grown adults uncomfortable in "Set It Off," and he played the President of the United States before half of Twitter was old enough to vote.
So it's a little strange that the internet has rediscovered him like a rare vinyl record someone found in their dad's garage.
The latest round of Underwood appreciation started, as all modern cultural events do, with a clip going viral for reasons nobody can fully explain.
This time it was his role in the short-lived but beloved series "The New Adventures of Old Christine," where he played a love interest so effortlessly charming that viewers collectively asked why he wasn't in every rom-com of the 2000s.
The answer, of course, is that Hollywood has historically had a very specific and very limited imagination when it comes to Black leading men.
Underwood spent years being the most handsome guy in the room and still had to fight for roles that didn't reduce him to "the hot one." He was in "Sex and the City" for a hot second.
He was in "Madea's Family Reunion," where he played a villain so convincingly that people still side-eye him at the grocery store.
Underwood played a terrifying, smooth-talking abuser in a 2018 episode of "Law & Order: SVU" that remains one of the most unsettling hours of television in the show's long, deeply upsetting run.
It's the kind of performance that should have won awards and instead mostly won him uncomfortable DMs from strangers.
But the current wave isn't about any single performance.
The man can do prestige drama, network sitcoms, horror ("The Purge" franchise), and theater, and he's been doing it since before most of his new fans were born.
He's also, by all accounts, genuinely nice, which is the rarest flex in show business.
What's funny about the Underwood revival is that it isn't really a revival.
He's been working steadily for decades, quietly stacking credits while the culture cycled through a dozen different definitions of what a leading man is supposed to look like.
Final Thoughts
It just finally caught up. **The take:** Underwood is a reminder that "overnight success" in Hollywood usually means "thirty years of being excellent while everyone else was distracted." The man deserves a renaissance, a memoir, and at least one Oscar campaign, in that order.