List of fictional actuaries

Fictional actuaries and the appearance of actuaries in works of fiction have been the subject of a number of articles in actuarial journals.

Film
  • About Schmidt (2002) - Warren Schmidt is portrayed by Jack Nicholson; the movie mostly covers Schmidt's retirement from an insurance company, and his adventures after retirement
  • Along Came Polly (2004) - Reuben Feffer (played by Ben Stiller) is a risk assessment expert, and though not explicitly stated, performs the job of an underwriter
  • Are You With It? (1948) - a musical comedy featuring Donald O'Connor as an actuary who is forced to join a carnival after misplacing a decimal point on a statistical table
  • The Billion Dollar Bubble (1976) - the Equity Funding scandal retold in the form of a movie, starring James Woods
  • Boyhood (2014) - Mason Evans, Sr. (played by Ethan Hawke) mentions at a baseball game that he recently passed his second actuarial exam, and later discusses his job at an insurance firm
  • Class Action (1991) - featured Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as father and daughter lawyers on opposite sides of a massive class action lawsuit; actuarial analysis plays a key role in the outcome
  • Double Indemnity (1944) - a Billy Wilder film, with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck; possibly the first to feature an actuary; the plot revolves around a murder that seeks to gain advantage from a particular aspect of an insurance policy; an insurance investigator (played by Edward G. Robinson) knows the actuarial statistics and becomes suspicious
  • Escape Clause (1996) - Andrew McCarthy plays Richard Ramsay in an actuarial thriller; to quote TVguide.com, "The makers of this direct-to-video release thought the world was ready for a thriller about an insurance actuary. They thought wrong."[1]
  • Fight Club (1999) - Edward Norton plays the protagonist, who briefly describes that his job entails the assessment of risk associated with car accidents for an insurance company; though not explicitly stated, he performs the job of an underwriter who uses actuarially derived premiums to benchmark quotes
  • Groundhog Day (1993) - Bill Murray's character Phil Connors is pestered daily by talkative insurance salesman Ned, who at one point insists that he has friends "who live and die by the actuarial tables."
  • It Chapter Two (2019) - James Ransone plays the adult version of Eddie Kaspbrak, who explains during the Losers Club's reunion dinner that he works as a risk analyst in New York. (In the novel and 1990 miniseries versions of the story, Eddie instead owns a limo company.)
  • Saw VI (2009) - William Easton is a health insurance executive who describes actuarial mathematics in a conversation with John Kramer
  • Stranger than Fiction (2006) - Harold Crick (played by Will Ferrell), a socially isolated IRS auditor, mentions that he was once engaged to an auditor who left him for an actuary
  • Sweet Charity (1969) - documents the romantic life of an actuary, played by John McMartin with Shirley MacLaine as his love interest
  • Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001) - starring Matthew McConaughey; the lives of a lawyer, an actuary, a housecleaner, a professor, and the people around them intersect as they ponder order and happiness in the face of life's cold unpredictability
  • Tron - the character Ram (played by Dan Shor) is an actuarial program
  • Zootopia (also released as Zootropolis) (2016) - the character Jaguar is a young tiger that aspires to be an actuary.
  • Hellboy (2019) - the character Major Ben Daimio played by Daniel Dae Kim, states that he was once an actuary; and used to assess risk based on a series of complex mathematical equations[2]

Literature
  • The Areas of My Expertise - by John Hodgman; portrays actuaries as prophets who predict the future, and are organized into various guilds; they have various ethics, such as not predicting the date of one's own death
  • Batman - comic series which featured a villain named the Actuary (Detective Comics #683-4 (March–April 1995)), a mathematical genius who applies formulae to aid the Penguin in committing crimes.
  • Bet Me - by Jennifer Crusie; the main character, Minerva Dobbs, is a thirty-something actuary looking for love
  • Un Certain Monsieur Blot - by Pierre Daninos; Mr. Blot is an actuary, who wins a competition as the most average man in France; the book includes the acerbic observation that “there were two kinds of actuaries – those who were still doing actuarial work and those who had found something better to do”
  • The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are part of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld fantasy series and feature Twoflower, the "actuary and world’s first tourist"
  • The Foundation Trilogy - by Isaac Asimov; often considered one of the greatest science fiction works of all time and features "psycho-historians," a sort of hidden priesthood that manipulates politics and economics on a galactic scale to accomplish the goals of peace and prosperity. Part of the theory is that on a planetary scale, people are not predictable but on a galactic scale, the law of large numbers (i.e., the Central Limit Theorem) is valid and therefore, the reactions of the galactic civilization, as a whole, are predictable. Given the characteristics of psycho-historians, they are very much like actuaries.
  • The Good Soldier Švejk - Lieutenant Pelikán is "a mathematician in an insurance firm"
  • "Hunted Down" - short story by Charles Dickens with an actuary, Mr. Meltham of the Inestimable Life Assurance Company, as its hero[3]
  • Industrial Magic - by Kelley Armstrong; character Reuben Aldrich is the head of the actuarial department at a supernatural organisation; he may also be a necromancer
  • Mrs. Warren's Profession - "I shall set up in chambers in the City and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing," says Vivie, the daughter of the eponymous heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play[4]
  • Preferred Risk - by Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey (under the pseudonym Edson McCann); describes a dystopian future dominated by the insurance industry; in Pohl's own words, "the one novel I wrote with Lester del Rey, which was called Preferred Risk, took a year out of my life. It's a terrible book. If you come across it, don't read it."[5]
  • The Year of the Jackpot - short story by Robert A. Heinlein; the male protagonist is a former actuary whose analysis of current events leads him to a disturbing conclusion about the fate of the world.

Manga
  • Homunculus - by Hideo Yamamoto; features Susumu Nakoshi as the story's protagonist, who was an actuary before he told people he was going on an extended vacation; instead, he lives in an old car; he resigns later in the story, and his reason for throwing his job away is still unknown
  • Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service - features a malevolent actuary who uses statistics to determine scenarios that will most likely result in the death of particular people

Television

Theater
  • I Love You Because (2006) - musical; major character Diana Bingley is an actuary; she suggests some formula-based "dating rules" to her friend Marcy in the key number "The Actuary Song"

Other
  • Society of Actuaries - holds a speculative actuarial fiction contest[9]
  • Wordplay - documentary which explores the world of crossword makers and aficionados; makes reference to actuaries as one of three occupations which are particularly adept at crossword solving
  • Zootopia - animated Disney film in which a tiger mistakenly believes that actuaries 'hunt for tax exemptions'

References
  1. "Escape Clause". TVGuide.com.
  2. Howard, Byron [@ByronPHoward] (March 14, 2016). "@jordanolling @thejaredbush The actuary's name is Jaguar (pronounced 'hog-u-are')" (Tweet). Retrieved December 25, 2016 – via Twitter.
  3. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-02. Retrieved 2013-01-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. http://www.the-actuary.org.uk/pdfs/02_10_peoplenews.pdf#search=%22%20%22actuaries%20in%20literature%22%22
  5. "Scifi.com". SYFY.
  6. "The Robinsons". TV.com.
  7. Nguyen, Hanh (2018-10-11). "'A Million Little Things' Series Creator Turns the Scorned-Woman Trope Inside Out". IndieWire. Retrieved 2019-09-19.
  8. ""Kim Possible" Odds Man in (TV Episode 2007)". IMDb. Retrieved 2021-07-21.
  9. "SOA - Speculative Fiction Collection". www.soa.org. Archived from the original on 2007-07-15.
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