Photo: Everett Collection

Amadeus is returning to screens the same way that so many well-regarded movies from the 1980s do: as a television miniseries. The material is fair game for re-adaptation, given that the Oscar-winning 1984 film is itself based, like the miniseries, on a 1979 play; all three stories fictionalize a supposed (and largely one-sided) rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Not only did the original film win Best Picture, F. Murray Abraham won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Salieri, the film’s tragic, jealous, shaken-up point-of-view character who yearns to achieve Mozart’s level of seemingly God-given genius. Abraham’s subsequent career was more character actor than movie star, but he has remained a fixture in film and TV over the past four decades. Ironically, it’s the actor who played the immature, irresponsible Mozart who has received less recognition over the years.

In fact, it’s not always remembered that Tom Hulce was actually nominated in the Best Actor category alongside Abraham; today, running two leads from the same film in the same category is almost unheard of in Oscar campaigning, and Hulce likely would have been relegated to a supporting-actor position in a 21st century version of that Amadeus dynamic. Maybe that would have netted him an award, and kept his profile higher in the movies. But Hulce’s career has been more interesting than that lower profile might immediately suggest.

First, there are other film performances of his, perhaps most notably in 1989’s Parenthood (another ’80s movie that came back as a TV series, albeit a network drama rather than a streaming miniseries event). Hulce plays Larry Buckman, the youngest of four grown siblings after Gil (Steve Martin), Helen (Dianne Wiest), and Susan (Harley Jane Kozak). Larry is the family’s black sheep and, despite the even number of siblings, the odd one out; the other three have relatively traditional lives with children and spouses (or ex-spouses), navigating the challenges of parenting. He’s more itinerant, disappearing for long stretches, often in pursuit of some kind of moneymaking scheme. Larry blows back into town with a surprise parenting twist of his own: He’s a new (or at least newly aware) dad, to a quiet biracial kid he’s named Cool (Alex Burrall) whose mother has recently left the country.

Hulce’s Amadeus experience left him well-versed in playing fecklessness, and one of the most impressive things about his performance as Larry is how close to the ground he plays it. He’s just charming enough to see why patriarch Frank (Jason Robards) has given his youngest a lot of leeway over the years, while also becoming increasingly easy to see through, as it dawns on the audience that this will not be a story about Larry stepping up and joining his siblings on the frontlines of parenthood. This character, who winds up ditching his school-aged kid with his own elderly father, isn’t the kind of person a movie star would be eager to play. Hulce, on the other hand, paints an unflinching portrait of a guy who can only gesture at the right thing without actually doing it.

Hulce was also Golden Globe-nominated for his performance in the drama Dominick and Eugene, and became a part of Disney history by supplying the voice of Quasimodo in the studio’s animated version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But before and after Amadeus, his career has focused largely on the stage. He starred opposite Anthony Hopkins in Equus; originated what would become the Tom Cruise role in the earlier Broadway production of Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men; and has since gotten into producing. He’s producing the current revival of Chess that snagged a few Tony nominations this week, and in the past has won a Tony himself for producing Spring Awakening; he was also nominated for the pop-centric American Idiot and Ain’t Too Proud. He also has an Emmy for the TV-movie version of the play The Heidi Chronicles, which means he’s halfway to EGOT status. (Abraham, for anyone keeping score, just has the Oscar, though he’s been nominated for some Emmys.)

Hulce is unlikely to complete that EGOT, as he’s more or less retired from film acting. (His last live-action feature: Jumper, with Hayden Christensen.) But his career offers a neat counterpoint to the fictional version of Salieri, consumed with his inability to claim the divine for his own. Sometimes it’s not so bad, being the other guy.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.