Īfter his breakout film role in 1994's Reality Bites, Zahn quickly gained a reputation for playing amiable stoners, slackers, and sidekicks in films such as That Thing You Do! (1996), You've Got Mail (1998), and Out of Sight (1998).

From 1991 to 1992, he played Hugo Peabody in a national tour of Bye Bye Birdie starring Tommy Tune, and subsequently appeared in two Off-Broadway plays, Sophistry and Eric Bogosian's Suburbia.

In 1991, Zahn formed the Malaparte theater company with a group of actor friends, including Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard. At A.R.T., he worked with the stage director Andrei Șerban. His fellow actors suggested that Zahn study acting, inspiring him to enroll in American Repertory Theater's two-year training program. In 1991, Zahn made his professional stage debut in a Minnesota production of Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues after falsely claiming to be a member of Actors' Equity. 'I wanted to be part of the circus.' Zahn later enrolled in the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University, earning a Master of Fine Arts. 'I remember sitting through the second act thinking, I'm as good as that guy standing on the barricade,' Zahn recalled. Zahn attended Gustavus Adolphus College for one semester but dropped out after seeing the original West End production of Les Misérables. Zahn with Jennifer Aniston at the premiere of their 2008 movie Management He graduated from Robbinsdale Cooper High School in 1986, planning eventually to join the United States Marine Corps. Zahn spent part of his childhood in Mankato, Minnesota, attending Kennedy Elementary School, and moved to the suburbs of Minneapolis for high school, where he acted in school plays and became a two-time Minnesota state speech champion. His father is of German and Swedish descent, and his mother is of German ancestry. Zahn was born in Marshall, Minnesota, the son of Carleton Edward Zahn, a Lutheran minister, and Zelda Clair Zahn, a bookstore clerk and later a YMCA administrator. He won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for his performance in the film Happy, Texas (1999). On television, Zahn appeared as Davis McAlary on HBO's Treme (2010–2013), and as Mark Mossbacher in the first season of the HBO satire comedy miniseries The White Lotus (2021), for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. His film roles include Reality Bites (1994), Stuart Little (1999), Shattered Glass (2003), Sahara (2005), Chicken Little (2005), the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series (2010–2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), The Good Dinosaur (2015), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). Steven James Zahn ( / z ɑː n/ born November 13, 1967) is an American actor and comedian.

Make Mine a Cowboy by Sandy Sullivan