Paul Woodrugh

A California Highway Patrol officer, Paul Woodrugh is clean-cut and dutiful on the outside, a war veteran with a rigid sense of order and a private life he keeps sealed off from everyone. He's polite, controlled, almost formal, and clearly uncomfortable with anything that asks him to look inward.

Kitsch plays him as a man performing composure, and the gap between that surface and what he's suppressing is where the character lives. Season 2 gives him the least exposition of its four leads, so the performance has to do the talking — tight jaw, careful eyes, a stillness that reads as discipline until you notice it's closer to dread.