Is Ron Livingston our generation's Bill Pullman?

Ron Livingston, AKA "Berger" from "Sex and the City" or the guy in "Office Space" is doing ads for Sprint now. Maybe in and of itself that's not that big of a deal, since Catherine Zeta-Jones was doing T-Mobile ads. However, Ron Livingston has never won an Oscar nor attained A-list status. And I'm also pretty certain Ron Livingston isn't married to a creepy older dude.

"Office Space" is a pretty big cult movie for people in the their 20's and 30's. It was full of cringe-inducing moments that really highlighted the banalities of most people's lives nowadays. Then he was "Berger", but "SATC" was always about the girls anyway. He got buzz for being in "Band of Brothers", I think.

And theirein lies the rub. There's been so much buzz around Ron Livingston for the last several years that you'd think he was a beekeeper. Yet he's never really been able to jump up to that next rung on the Hollywood ladder. Unlike Sam Rockwell (another much buzzed-about but never quite gotten there actor) he's generally considered conventionally handsome in a rugged, 40's movie star kind of way. And it seems that he is actually a good actor. So those factors combined with buzz should generally equal big roles being thrown his way, but that just doesn't seem to be happening.

Hence the Bill Pullman analogy. He did supporting roles in some pretty big movies in the 80's and was on the cusp of being a movie star in the 90's when he...well, just did more supporting roles in big movies. He played the President in "Independence Day" and some people thought he was going to finally blow up then. But he played nebbishy fiancees with weird allergies and second banana to Alec Baldwin instead. The guy's still working, but again, despite having the looks, talent and early buzz just never really got as famous as it might have seemed he was going to.

But maybe there's still hope for Ron Livingston just yet. There are tons of actors who leapt out from the starting gate then stayed in the race while trailing a bit but came out ahead in the end.

I just can't really remember who any of them might be at this particular moment.