David Ury

The Japanese in David Ury's résumé is real. Born in Sonoma, California, he studied linguistics at Evergreen State College, spent time studying in Japan and came back fluent, and translating film, television and manga became the steady job underneath everything else. He moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to try stand-up.

That second language also fed his best-known comic creation. On YouTube he plays Ken Tanaka, a man adopted as a baby by Japanese parents who goes looking for his birth family, and he runs further character pieces there, among them Karaoke Steve.

As a screen actor he tends to be cast as the lowlife of the episode; the cartoonist Keith Knight summed up his parts as reprobates and sleazeballs, and a good number of those characters die before the credits roll. The most famous is Spooge, whom he played in the Breaking Bad episodes Breakage and Peekaboo in 2009 and brought back for Better Call Saul in 2022. His other credits include Heroes and Malcolm in the Middle.