Gary Cole’s history of jerks before Chicago Fire

Gary Cole plays a jerk as Chicago Fire’s Carl Grissom, but he’s kind of used to it. Here’s a history of Gary Cole’s best difficult characters.

Gary Cole became the man we loved to hate in Chicago Fire season 6, and there might be a big reason for that: he’s pretty good at this sort of thing.

The Emmy Award nominee recurred throughout the most recent season of Chicago Fire as Chief Carl Grissom, who was first introduced as a friendly face from Kelly Severide’s (Taylor Kinney) past before becoming a present-day nemesis for Chief Wallace Boden (Eamonn Walker). He made the character someone who became completely insufferable, and based on how the season ended, he is only getting started causing trouble.

But if you think Grissom is a pain, you haven’t seen some of the other characters Gary Cole has portrayed over the years. Both in TV and film, he’s come up with some other roles where he’s not the greatest guy in the world (even if some of them are really fun to watch!). We’ve put together this list of five of Gary Cole’s most memorable characters who have given audiences just as much of a hard time as Grissom.

It should be noted that Gary Cole himself is a great person, and that he has played a number of characters who are not jerks—he played Jesse Lee Soffer‘s dad in the The Brady Bunch Movie, after all!

But we admire his ability to take a character who is totally unlikeable and make them utterly watchable. In honor of how much chaos he’s brought to One Chicago, click through this slideshow to see other Gary Cole characters who make Carl Grissom look like a saint.