‘The Luckiest Man In America’ Review: Paul Walter Hauser Games The System On ‘Press Your Luck’ And Delivers Another Winning Weirdo Portrayal – Toronto Film Festival
deadline.comSince breaking through (at least to me) as the loose cannon nutso friend Shawn Eckardt in I, Tonya, Paul Walter Hauser has had a series of celebrated roles playing guys on the outskirts, including the bumbling Horace in Cruella, “Stingray” in Cobra Kai, the title character of the accused Atlanta Olympics bomber in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, hopeless criminal Booch in the current The Instigators, and his Emmy-winning role as creepy killer Larry Hall in Black Bird.
Well, chalk up another one as Hauser knocks it out of the park on the weirdo scale as legendary game show contestant Michael Larson in The Luckiest Man in America, which just had its world premiere as one of the 2024 Toronto Film Festival’s opening-night attractions.
Larson became infamous in 1984 as a nerdy unemployed guy with three ex-wives, who travels across country in his beat-up ice cream truck to audition for the CBS daytime game show Press Your Luck.
Looking like a slob and wearing cargo shorts, the show’s casting director (Shamier Anderson) finds Michael to be super creepy, especially when they discover he is posing as someone else slated for the appointment (he had to get in someway).
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