The Unusual Suspects

“All great actors are really character actors.”

--Orson Welles

Remember when an entertaining bit by a great character actor used to save an otherwise lousy movie? Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh could turn up, make something diverting out of a mundane script, and all of a sudden the two hours didn’t seem quite so wasted.

Movies have certainly changed since the days of Hollywood golden agers Patsy Kelly and Everett Sloane. Nowadays, most actors don’t want to be labeled “character” actors. To some, the phrase seems pejorative, suggesting a limited range, a tendency to play the same type again and again, or an inability to break out of the pack and reach A-level status. (Indeed, some actors contacted for this story did not want to participate for those reasons.)

“The term as we know it, and most film buffs use it, refers to supporting players, who tend to play a more colorful range of characters than the leading man or woman,” film historian Leonard Maltin says.

He cites the classic “Casablanca” as the ultimate character-actor movie. “Every single person who speaks in that film is colorful and interesting. That’s very rare nowadays.”

The studio system that created movies like “Casablanca,” and kept all those supporting players under contract, is kaput. But those kinds of actors do exist. The best of today’s supporting actors help to make contemporary films better. Especially when the movies themselves are, shall we say, less than they ought to be.

“There used to be the leading man, leading woman and the juveniles. The character actors were all the other people: the mother, the father, the uncle, the crook and so forth,” says veteran acting coach Jeff Corey, whose character turns have spiced up movies from “The Killers” (1946) to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).

Corey, 87, has taught hundreds of actors, from James Dean and Jack Nicholson to Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand. He cites a historical basis for the concept of character acting. “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights believed in the humors of the human body--some people are phlegmatic, bilious and so forth. In ‘Julius Caesar,’ Brutus was a sanguine man, but Cassius was splenetic.”

Directors dating back to D.W. Griffith often depended on the same stable of actors again and again, sometimes playing similar parts. Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Ben Johnson, Jane Darwell and others show up regularly in John Ford westerns.

Ditto William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn and Jimmy Conlin in Preston Sturges comedies. Maltin also cites the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance films of the ‘30s as an example. “People went to see them for Fred and Ginger,” he concedes, “but those films were built on the shoulders of great comedy character actors: Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, Victor Moore, Helen Broderick.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created categories for supporting actor and actress Oscars in 1936. “By the middle ‘30s,” says film critic and author David Thomson, “it was quite clear that there was something in the nature of Hollywood storytelling that [required] the supporting actor. People were being cast to do again what they had done before: the crusty old teacher, the senior editor to the young newspaper reporter.... It’s very much a notion that the world is made up of stories about heroes who are surrounded by tent poles, lesser characters.”

So how do you define “character actor” in today’s very different moviemaking environment? There’s the quirky, always interesting fellow (Steve Buscemi, Jim Broadbent, Billy Bob Thornton, Philip Seymour Hoffman); the nut case (James Woods, Christopher Walken, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper); the aging star (Maggie Smith, James Coburn, Lauren Bacall); the girlfriend/confidante (Joan Cusack, Janeane Garofalo, Rosie O’Donnell); and so forth.

“Part of what you get when you hire Steve Buscemi or Christopher Walken or Joe Pantoliano or M. Emmet Walsh is the baggage they bring with them,” Maltin says. “They’re not necessarily similar characters, but we anticipate them doing something interesting. Just as the audience [in the ‘30s and ‘40s] must have felt when they saw Eugene Pallette or Allen Jenkins or Frank McHugh.”

“Christopher Lloyd, Geoffrey Lewis, Harvey Keitel, Rip Torn, Gene Hackman, Seymour Cassel--these are men who don’t necessarily get the girl, so we refer to them as character men,” says casting director Mike Fenton, who helped to assemble the casts of “Chinatown,” “Shampoo,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

He says American attitudes differ from those of the British. Judi Dench shifts effortlessly from a brief bit in “Shakespeare in Love” to the demanding title role in “Iris.” “I think that Helen Mirren can star in a film as a leading lady, or she can play Aunt Tillie,” Fenton says. “It doesn’t matter.”

Thomson agrees: “There’s a tradition in British repertory theater where you would engage a star, and in a season he might play a couple of very big parts, but he also might play a couple of very small parts.

“That feeling of versatility and dedication to the group enterprise is very important to the supporting actor,” Thomson continues, “because he or she knows that they’re not dominant. But they know they’re valuable, and they have to be content with that, with a very much reduced level of pay.”

Meanwhile, “the industry is almost driving character actors out of existence,” Maltin contends. “What happens is, when someone gets some notice, some real attention, their salary goes up.”

But with major stars now demanding $10 million to $20 million for the lead roles, there’s little money left for supporting actors.

Maltin cites a recent case in which a veteran character actor was approached about a big-budget film and told that the deal was $3,000 a week, “take it or leave it,” because of a deal with the entire supporting cast. He took it, because he wanted the work, even though it was far below his usual asking price.

Thomson’s favorites--the Thelma Ritters, Agnes Mooreheads and Akim Tamiroffs--aren’t around anymore. But neither, for the most part, is the need for a character “type” to play endless variations on a single theme. Today’s supporting actors are expected to be trained, smart and versatile.

Adds Fenton: “Not everybody can star in the movie. The rest of the people are the characters supporting the stars. They may be leading people in type, but they are the character actors. They are the people who make the movie work.”

Some of the industry’s best supporting players are appearing in this year’s summer movies:

Peter Stormare

He may be the only actor whose resume includes Ingmar Bergman, Jerry Bruckheimer and the Coen brothers. Currently on view as Ingvar, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ mysterious neighbor on NBC’s “Watching Ellie,” Stormare will be featured in four films this summer: “Windtalkers,” “Minority Report,” “The Tuxedo” and “Bad Company.”

The 48-year-old Swede began his career on stage, taking direction from Bergman for 11 years in Sweden’s Royal National Theatre. But it was as Buscemi’s blond, silent partner in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Fargo” (1996) that he was first widely noticed.

In Bruckheimer’s summer ’98 blockbuster “Armageddon,” Stormare got laughs as the Russian cosmonaut who nearly gets Bruce Willis’ team killed during a refueling stop. He also played the nice guy in love with Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” and Lena Olin’s abusive husband in “Chocolat” (both 2000).

“I don’t envy Bruce Willis or Schwarzenegger or Banderas or Cage or Clooney,” Stormare says. “They have to have the same hairdo and the same clothes in every movie, whether it’s in outer space or if it’s a movie about dinosaurs. I like what I’m doing. I feel rewarded when people say, ‘Oh, that’s not you in that movie.’ Some people think I’m working at the local Sav-on.”

Liev Schreiber

Of all the cast members in the “Scream” movies, perhaps only Schreiber has gone on to a substantial, wide-ranging career in respected movies.

He was Stuart Besser, the time-traveler who makes Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman’s love affair possible, in the holiday hit “Kate & Leopold.” He was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Orson Welles in “RKO 281,” the 1999 HBO movie about the making of “Citizen Kane.” And he was part of the Canadian team that helped free unjustly imprisoned Denzel Washington in “The Hurricane” (1999).

Schreiber doesn’t dismiss his appearances as Cotton Weary in the horror trilogy. “They probably increased my exposure to a great degree. A lot of people saw those films that might not have seen me do ‘Hamlet’ at the New York Shakespeare Festival,” he says with a laugh.

This summer, the 34-year-old New Yorker plays John Clark, a CIA operative with a pivotal role in the Tom Clancy thriller “The Sum of All Fears.” Smart, ruthless and ready (but reluctant) to kill if necessary, Clark is an American James Bond minus the wisecracks and martinis. There is already talk of spinning off his character into his own films, so Schreiber may have a chance to tackle the role again.

“I don’t think of myself as a character actor,” he says. “All actors play characters. That’s what we do. These are definitions of the industry that have little to do with acting. You are contracted to play a part and you play that part regardless of how big or small it is. Paul Newman, his whole career, thought he was a character actor, and he’s one of the most well-known leading men ever.”

Seth Green

He used to be Oz, the guitar-playing werewolf on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Then he was Scott, the mouthy son of Dr. Evil in the original “Austin Powers” spy spoof in 1997.

Since then, Green’s stock has been rising, with a role in the hit teen comedy “Can’t Hardly Wait” (1998), a reprise of his Scott Evil character in “The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), and meatier roles in two of last summer’s films: “America’s Sweethearts” and “Rat Race.”

Now he’s returned to TV as production assistant Jimmy Bender on Fox’s puppet-show sendup “Greg the Bunny” and back for a third time as Scott Evil in the new “Austin Powers” sequel.

The 28-year-old redhead admits that he had reservations about doing both “Austin Powers” sequels. “Is this worth doing? Is this going to be funny? Is this somebody trying to capitalize on an established thing? I read the script and I was just delighted that it had been so well thought-out. They don’t come from a place of ‘how can we tell the same jokes again?’”

Green is now playing James St. James, a fixture on the ‘90s New York club circuit, in “Party Monster,” the true story of party promoter and convicted killer Michael Alig (who’s played by Macaulay Culkin). “It’s a very challenging thing that I’m really excited about and afraid of at the same time.”

Pruitt Taylor Vince

Don’t call Vince a character actor. “I hate that term,” he says, “because I know what it means: You’re going to play the best friend or the creep or the clown, but you’re never going to be the guy.”

On the other hand, he says, “I’ve been here 15 years and to this day, I’m still officially classified as, ‘We don’t know what to do with him.’”

A handful of directors have known what to do with the 41-year-old Baton Rouge, La., native. He was the small-town sheriff who catches up with Renee Zellweger in “Nurse Betty” (2000); the down-and-out jazz musician who relates “The Legend of 1900” (1999); and what he calls “the sweet but slow guy” opposite Paul Newman in “Nobody’s Fool” (1994).

Vince won a 1997 Emmy for his chilling portrayal of a vigilante killer on “Murder One.” He enjoyed a rare leading role in the 1995 Sundance favorite “Heavy,” playing a lovelorn pizza chef.

Director Andrew Niccol cast him in this summer’s “Simone” as a low-rent Bob Woodward, the trench-coated investigative reporter for a sleazy tabloid who is out to discover Hollywood’s best-kept secret: the location of the title character, a mysterious beauty being kept under wraps by movie director Al Pacino. Later this year, in “Trapped,” he will play sidekick to kidnapper Kevin Bacon.

“I’ve been typecast in certain ways,” he concedes, “but in a good way, I’ve never been famous for one movie. So I’ve been able to fly under the radar and play a lot of different things. I want one of those old-fashioned careers that last 40 years, not four.”

Tony Shalhoub

Many observers felt that Shalhoub should have been nominated for an Oscar for his role in last year’s Coen brothers’ film, “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” As big-city lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider, who shows up to represent accused murderer Frances McDormand, he energized the movie.

“Every once in a while you get lucky, like with the Coen brothers,” Shalhoub says. “That happened to be a period, the 1940s, that fits me very well.” (“Man” was set in 1949; his earlier Coen brothers film, “Barton Fink,” was also set in the ‘40s.) Shalhoub, 48, has been lucky a lot, especially in the past five years.

He enjoyed a brief role in the 1997 sci-fi comedy “Men in Black” as Jeebs, an alien weapons dealer. He reprises that role in this summer’s sequel, although, Shalhoub says, “he looks somewhat different because he’s degenerated even more, having had his head blown off several times between movies.”

Since playing Antonio, the Italian cab driver on the long-running series “Wings,” he has won attention as an uncompromising chef in Stanley Tucci’s “Big Night” (1996), the strangely non-Asian crewman Fred Kwan in “Galaxy Quest” (1999) and a street prophet in the current Angelina Jolie film “Life or Something Like It.”

Shalhoub returns to TV this summer in the title role of the USA series “Monk,” about an ex-police detective who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I wanted to have a series with a part that was really odd and challenging, and this affords me that,” he says, “because the guy is so messed up.”

Anna Friel

Friel is still building a profile in the U.S., but she’s already famous throughout England for her character on a nighttime soap, described by one writer as “a murderous, sexually abused lesbian” who gave British TV its first two-woman smooch.

Since then, she’s done Dickens for the BBC (“Our Mutual Friend,” which aired on “Masterpiece Theatre” in 1999), made a splash on Broadway (in “Closer,” which won her a Drama Desk Award) and appeared in two American films, neither of which was widely seen: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1999), in which she played Hermia opposite Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer; and the Barry Levinson comedy “An Everlasting Piece” (2000), in which she played the feisty girlfriend of an Irish wig salesman.

Friel, 25, is hoping her next role will bring her a bit more attention. She stars with Michelle Williams (“Dawson’s Creek”) in “Me Without You,” a film about the ups and downs of two best friends over three decades in England. She describes her character as “an incredibly complex teenager who uses her body to get what she wants, someone who’s very confused and terribly needy.”

She wants to be “a bit more known in America” and she’s on her way: She’s now in Montreal shooting “Timeline,” an $80-million time-travel tale directed by Richard Donner and written by Michael Crichton.

Asked if she considers herself a character actor, she replies, “Yeah! Hopefully a pretty one.”

Chris Cooper

Cooper likes to do his research before shooting starts. “Half the joy for me--if it’s called for, if it’s a historical piece--is doing the homework,” he says, “sitting down in the easy chair night after night and learning about this character or analyzing the script.”

Many of his best-known roles have benefited from Cooper’s meticulous preparation, beginning with his first film, John Sayles’ West Virginia miners’ union saga, “Matewan” (1987). He was also the Texas border-town sheriff in Sayles’ “Lone Star” (1996), the stern father figure in “October Sky” (1999) and the rigid, homophobic ex-Marine in 1999’s best picture Oscar winner, “American Beauty.”

But it pains the 50-year-old Missouri native when his work is chopped and a once-rich character portrait loses much of its nuance. On “American Beauty,” for example, “a good 40% to 50% of my work was cut out of that film. It was just devastating,” Cooper says.

This summer, he plays the chief of a secret operations unit at CIA’s Langley headquarters in “The Bourne Identity,” an action thriller starring Matt Damon that’s based on a Robert Ludlum novel. Later this year, he will play orchid-cloning schemer John Laroche in the complex “Adaptation,” from the “Being John Malkovich” team of director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman.

“When I go to a film, I don’t necessarily want to be entertained,” Cooper says. “I want those characterizations and story to really take me on a trip. I want to be completely engrossed in the story, as opposed to seeing a bunch of pretty faces and a bunch of tricks up on the screen.”

Danny Trejo

Trejo is not the only actor in Hollywood with a criminal record. But he may be the only one who has turned a decade in state prison on drug and robbery convictions into a steady stream of bad-guy roles for 17 years.

With his weather-beaten face, tattooed chest and arms, and frightening scowl, the 57-year-old doesn’t have to act much. “I look like a bad guy,” he points out. “I don’t look like a guy named Todd.”

He’s softening his image just a bit with his recurring role in the “Spy Kids” films as Uncle Machete, who started out as a tough-guy gadget-maker but who came to the rescue at the end of last year’s original film. (He’s hoping there will soon be an Uncle Machete action figure.)

Trejo has worked regularly for his cousin, director Robert Rodriguez: in the “Spy Kids” movies, the “From Dusk Till Dawn” vampire trilogy and the upcoming “Desperado” sequel, “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

He was also a convict in the Chicano gang epic “Bound by Honor” (1993), a thug in “Heat” (1995) and a rapist in “Con Air” (1997).

Trejo got into the movies through what he calls his real job, counseling recovering drug and alcohol abusers like himself. It happened on the set of “Runaway Train” (1985), where he was spotted and asked if he could play a convict. He also wound up training actor Eric Roberts as a boxer. “Most of the actors in Hollywood have never even been in a fight,” he says, mimicking their usual response to his queries: “Are you kidding? I went to Harvard.”

Jill Clayburgh

Best-known for her starring roles of the late ‘70s, including back-to-back best actress Oscar nominations for “An Unmarried Woman” (1978) and “Starting Over” (1979), Clayburgh has made a comeback in recent years, often in supporting roles on television.

She currently plays the eccentric socialite mom on NBC’s “Leap of Faith,” and before that was a mom on two short-lived series in the ‘98-’99 season. She has also played Ally McBeal’s mother on the Fox series.

Her new film, the $500,000 indie “Never Again,” is about two people in their 50s who happen to meet in a gay bar: Jeffrey Tambor’s character, single for three decades, thinks he may be gay; Clayburgh’s is a single mother experiencing empty-nest syndrome. “It’s pretty raunchy and ‘out there’ and ultimately extremely funny,” says Clayburgh, 58. “It’s about possibilities and what can happen in people’s lives.” Rather than capitalizing on her late ‘70s success with more high-profile commercial films, she worked with Bernardo Bertolucci (“La Luna,” 1979), Costa-Gavras (“Hanna K,” 1983) and Andrei Konchalovsky (“Shy People,” 1987), none of which were successful. “It was just who I was at the time,” she says. “Now I look back and think, I don’t know if I would have done that. But the adventure of making movies is really very important to me. Those were very adventurous projects.”

David Ogden Stiers

He’s played King Lear and conducted symphony orchestras. He was Maj. Winchester for six seasons on TV’s “MASH.” He’s also done five Woody Allen movies, notably as the criminally minded hypnotist in last year’s “Curse of the Jade Scorpion.”

But Stiers has also secured a unique kind of fame with the younger set, performing voices in five animated Disney features, including 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast” (also, “Pocahontas,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Atlantis”). In this summer’s “Lilo & Stitch,” he is the voice of Jumba Jookiba, an alien scientist--with a Russian accent, Stiers notes--whom Disney publicity describes as “a bit of a loudmouth with some serious anger-management issues.”

Is voice-over character acting different from performing in front of a camera? “My notion is that it all starts in the same place. I don’t care if you’re doing a VW commercial or Euripides,” says Stiers, 59.

“There is an elevation of emotion, spirit, audibility, that happens particularly in classical theater,” he adds.

“Once you’re unafraid on stage to do the storm scene in ‘Lear’ or be the ghost in ‘Hamlet,’ you can summon all those images of size and space and vividness in front of a microphone.”

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Jon Burlingame is a regular contributor to Calendar.