Assistant Director Walter Skinner

Skinner runs the FBI's Violent Crimes division and, on paper, exists to rein in Mulder and Scully — to enforce budgets, deadlines, and the Bureau's patience for cases involving aliens and monsters. He's a former Marine, clipped and unreadable behind his desk, a bureaucrat who seems to have no time for the unexplained.

The pleasure of Skinner is watching that surface crack. He's written as institutional authority, but Pileggi plays every scene with a coiled tension suggesting a man who knows more than he lets on and is choosing, deliberately, which battles to fight for his agents. The stillness is the performance.