His television roles include Bruce Ben-Bacharach in Lady Dynamite (2016–2017), Gumbald in Adventure Time (2017–2018), Arthur Hart in WandaVision (2021), and Tom Posorro in Barry (2022–2023).
[2] Melamed was born in Queens, New York, the product of a brief love affair between Nancy Zala, an actress and director, and Stan Silverstone, a British psychoanalyst.
"[4] He began his theatrical training at Hampshire College, where he worked with (and was heavily influenced by) Tina Packer, John Guare, Jean-Claude van Itallie, and members of The Living Theatre.
For his portrayal of "sensitive" villain Sy Ableman, in Joel and Ethan Coen's 2009 film, A Serious Man, which was nominated for Best Picture at the 2010 Academy Awards, he became widely known.
[citation needed] Several leading U.S. critics, including A. O. Scott of The New York Times, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, and Roger Ebert all said his performance was worthy of Academy Award nomination.
He is a present or past recurring guest star on USA Network's Benched, Showtime's House of Lies, HBO's Girls, Childrens Hospital, Blunt Talk, FX's Married, and Trial & Error.
Melamed appeared in the Sundance film Lemon (2017), a collaboration with Brett Gelman and Janicza Bravo, Brawl in Cell Block 99 opposite Vince Vaughn, Sean McGinly's Silver Lake, which he starred in with Martin Starr, and Dragged Across Concrete.
Melamed had previously starred as Sam in Lake Bell's In a World..., winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival, opposite Kurt Russell and Richard Jenkins in Bone Tomahawk, and re-teamed with the Coen brothers and co-stars George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Ralph Fiennes in Hail, Caesar!
Prior to that, he had starred in Get on Up (2014), a bio-pic about the life of James Brown, and opposite Elliott Gould, as auteur/director Bob Wilson, in Fred Won't Move Out, a film about the decline of a stubborn patriarch and his family.
On Broadway in 2011, after a long hiatus from the theatre, Melamed originated the roles of The Father in Ethan Coen's Talking Cure, and Thomas Moran in Elaine May's George Is Dead, two of the one-act plays that comprised Relatively Speaking.
[citation needed] As a writer, he has produced screenplays including Girl of the Perfume River, A Jones for Gash, The Asshat Project, and is currently at work on a long-form, television version of The Preservationist, a fictional drama inspired by the case of Melamed's college friend, Edward Forbes Smiley III, a renowned cartographic expert and dealer, who admitted to having been the most brazen and prolific map thief of all time.
The film was a modest critical success with Dennis Harvey of Variety writing, "Lying and Stealing manages to be a retro escapist pleasure — one whose cleverness might actually have been muffled by flashier surface assets.
In 2021, Melamed was named by a host of prominent critics and film professionals in Vulture and New York Magazine[citation needed] as one of "The 32 Greatest Character Actors Working Today".