Even in his best-known role - as the mortuary paterfamilias, Nathaniel Fisher, in the television series Six Feet Under - Jenkins was dead, haunting the characters from the margins, a figment of their inner lives.
In Six Feet Under, he recurred at unpredictable intervals, giving scenes instant texture.
So too in his film career, which has seen directors use him repeatedly as ballast for other people's star turns, as detectives and lawyers and dads, both in heavy drama and light comedy.
See his comic turn as a town lawyer, drunk on his porch, in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There.
See him as a gay field agent for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster.
See him, as did writer-director Tom McCarthy, in the Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez romance Shall We Dance?, in which Jenkins played a private detective hired by Susan Sarandon's character to spy on her husband.
"Like with all good actors, it looks effortless," said McCarthy.
"You don't see the acting."
McCarthy, whose first film was 2003's well-received The Station Agent, has given Jenkins the first lead role of his long movie career, as a widowed economics professor named Walter Vale (the role, for whatever it's worth, is his fourth Walter) in The Visitor.
The film marks the first time someone has showcased Jenkins' dry, even ordinary qualities as more than a countervailing note in a larger, more hectic world.
Oddly for Hollywood, Jenkins seems - just now, at 60 - to be hitting his movie prime.
In The Visitor, Jenkins' Walter drives the action and sets the film's emotional tone.
Fittingly, the script, which McCarthy wrote with Jenkins in mind, is dexterously light on inner-life detail.
What we know about Walter could fit on a cue card: His wife was a concert pianist.
He teaches global economics on a Connecticut campus.
He goes to departmental meetings, then goes home.
"If you knew that character of Walter, if you worked with him, you would be frustrated with this character," McCarthy said.
"You would sense he was sleepwalking through his life. It's a real credit to Richard that he could keep a character like that compelling."
The Visitor is about Walter's growing entanglement with the couple - Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian jazz drummer who comes to face deportation in a post-September 11 New York and Tarek's Senegalese jewellery-maker girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), as well as Tarek's attractive mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass).
But amid this, McCarthy's camera keeps on Walter, as if begging the question, "Are you there?""He wanted an Everyman," Jenkins said.
"And I love playing characters that don't initiate things. I love doing that. I like to watch."
Rich inscrutability is a recurring theme in the parts Jenkins has nailed.
One of the more memorable episodes of Six Feet Under, called The Room, had Nate (Peter Krause) discovering his late father had bartered his mortuary services for the use of a spare room above an Indian restaurant, suggesting the father led some kind of double life.
"What I loved about him in Six Feet," Alan Ball, the show's creator, said by phone, "is there's this genuine decency that he has, but you get the sense that there's a lot of serious complexity beneath that surface." - Paul Brownfield
