Continuing with my occasional looks at actors earlier in their careers… 

Robert Knepper is an actor that I didn’t really become aware of until sometime in the 2000s, when I saw that he usually played villainous or menacing characters, such as T-Bag in Prison Break.

It was only later on that I realized that I had seen him much earlier in shows such as Murder, She Wrote, where his roles weren’t nearly as unsavory.

Still, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered I saw him in his very first television appearance, playing the part of George in the pilot episode of one of my favorite shows of the 1980s, L.A. Law. He was going by Rob Knepper in those days.

Here’s a brief video that juxtaposes his role as T-Bag in 2006 with that of his first appearance as George in 1986. The scene from Prison Break is one of his milder scenes from that show. He has just broken out of prison and has stopped in with his ex-girlfriend whose children think of him as “Uncle Teddy”. The scene from L.A. Law needs no introduction.