Gene Cousineau

Gene Cousineau runs a Los Angeles acting class full of hopefuls chasing the fame he once brushed against decades ago. He's vain, self-mythologizing, and given to grand pronouncements about Craft, but there's real warmth underneath the ego, especially toward students he considers his own. He wants relevance again, badly.

Winkler plays the fraud and the true believer as the same person, which is the joke and the ache of it. Gene's speeches about acting are absurd and also, somehow, sincerely meant — he's a bad teacher who occasionally says something true by accident. That wobble between pompous and tender is what makes him funny instead of just sad.