Why Agent Evans From Ozark Looks So Familiar
Other than the Byrde family, Ruth Langmore, and a few other integral characters, the supporting cast of Netflix's Ozark tends to not stick around for too long before finding themselves on the wrong side of one of Marty or Wendy's schemes. However, there are a few holdouts who have managed to literally keep their head on their shoulders throughout all three seasons of the dark crime drama series. One of the most notable is FBI Agent Trevor Evans.
Agent Evans was introduced all the way back on Ozark season 1, which premiered on Netflix in July 2017. The ex-boyfriend of Agent Roy Petty (Jason Butler Harner), Evans follows a tip from his former flame to begin investigating the Byrde family, which leads him down a three-season-long rabbit hole of unraveling their ever-growing criminal empire. On a show full of some pretty outlandish characters, Agent Evans is definitely one of the more grounded personas in the ensemble, but after three seasons of nipping at Marty (Jason Bateman) and Wendy's (Laura Linney) heels, he's become a fixture on the show.
If you're wondering where else you've seen McKinley Belcher III, the actor who brings Agent Evans to life, you're not alone. Although Belcher isn't as high-profile as some of his Oscar- and Emmy-nominated co-stars, he has had a career full of memorable roles. Let's look at where you may have seen Ozark's longest-surviving FBI agent before.
McKinley Belcher III fought for his family on HBO's Show Me a Hero
After an early career marked by one-off roles on network crime procedurals and sitcoms, Belcher landed a recurring part on the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero. Set in the suburbs of New York City in the late '80s and early '90s, the show is a sprawling tale of the battle over public housing in Yonkers, and was co-written by David Simon of The Wire fame.
On Show Me a Hero, Belcher played Dwayne Meeks, the son of a home health aid worker who's losing her eyesight to a degenerative illness. For Dwayne, the fight for safe, affordable, and accessible public housing becomes deeply personal when he watches his mother struggle to navigate a system that is failing her at every turn. Things are further complicated by the fact that because she lives in public housing, she has a hard time hiring an at-home nurse to take care of her as her blindness progresses since they're all afraid it's too dangerous to visit her at home.
Although his role in the ensemble drama based on real events was small, it no doubt provided Belcher a springboard from which to jump to heftier roles as his career began to take off.
McKinley Belcher III was a man with a secret on Mercy Street
For his next big TV role, Belcher again turned to a period piece — albeit one set over 100 years before Show Me a Hero. On the PBS medical drama Mercy Street, the actor played Samuel Diggs, a free African American laborer living in Alexandria, Virginia and working at the Mansion House Hospital during the Civil War. Diggs has valuable medical knowledge he gleaned during his childhood spent as a servant to a liberal physician, but the fact that he's a black man in the 19th century means he's often forced to hide it from the doctors and nurses who work at the hospital.
Belcher relished the complex role on Mercy Street. In an interview for PBS he said of playing Diggs, "It's really exciting because in every scene I do there's a balance to be struck between what I show and what I actually know. I think it's a beautiful challenge to have."
Unfortunately, that particular challenge only lasted for two seasons before Mercy Street was canceled by PBS due to funding and scheduling issues on the intricate period piece production. Thankfully for Belcher, Samuel Diggs was far from the last juicy role on his resume.
McKinley Belcher III was wrongly accused on The Passage
After Mercy House, Belcher took on another role as a misunderstood man with a secret. This time he played Anthony Carter, a man wrongfully convicted of the murder of his former employer, on the Fox sci-fi drama The Passage. Carter is given the opportunity to get out of jail by participating in a shadowy government drug trial.
Of course, the opportunity is too good to be true. The drug the government is testing has the potential to make humans immune from disease, but also has the unfortunate side effect of turning its hosts into zombified, vampire-like creatures. Carter and other inmates are used in the human trials to see if it's possible to get all the extended human longevity effects without turning the subjects into superhuman bloodthirsty monsters. Needless to say, the scientists don't quite succeed.
The Passage was based on a popular series of novels by Justin Cronin, but sadly, the adaptation failed to connect with viewers and was canceled at Fox after just one season. However, given his diverse resume, the axing of The Passage is unlikely to slow the Ozark actor's career. Things are bound to only get better and brighter for McKinley Belcher III.