Steve Schneider

Steve Schneider is David Koresh's right hand at Mount Carmel, the articulate, sensitive believer who fields calls from the FBI negotiators when the siege begins. He's thoughtful and well-read, devoted to the group's faith, and caught between loyalty to Koresh and his own uneasy conscience as federal agents surround the compound.

Paul Sparks plays him as a man arguing himself into belief in real time, all nervous intelligence and strained calm on the phone lines. The writing resists making him either dupe or zealot, and Sparks finds the anguish underneath the reasonableness — a true believer who never quite silences his own doubt.