brief encounters #4: characters and character actors

Character actor extraordinaire Thomas Jay Ryan leads team through rehearsal in Dance Nation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Yesterday, I was walking up Third Ave. when I saw Thomas Jay Ryan, one of my favorite character actors. I had to say hi.

“Mr. Ryan, hello,” I said.

Ryan, who was carrying a few bags as if he’d just been shopping, looked at me closely, trying to figure out if he should know who I was. He was the lead in his first movie, Hal Hartley’s 1997 Henry Fool, and has since appeared in about forty movies and TV series but is primarily a stage actor.

“You wouldn’t remember me,” I acknowledged, “but a few years ago we bumped into each other downtown. I told you how much I had enjoyed The Amateurs, and you told me that I had to see your next show, Dance Nation.”

“I do remember that a little,” he responded. “So, did you see it?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I loved it.”

“Great!”

We talked about what he had just finished (he had replaced Bill Irwin as Serebriakóv in an intimate production of Uncle Vanya) and what was next for him (he’ll be Major Paul Petkoff in the Gingold adaptation of Shaw’s Arms and the Man beginning October 17). We then went our separate ways, but I have a feeling we’ll meet again.

Since I was a kid, I’ve been drawn to character actors, in movies, on television, and in theater. And I’m not talking about second bananas or third bananas but those performers whose names appear much lower in the credits, who get a couple of key scenes but not much time center stage. Most people don’t know, and don’t care, who the fourteenth person in the credits is. I do.

“The first role I ever played [Jimmy in 1958’s The Cry Baby Killer] I had the lead and it’s pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am,” a humble Jack Nicholson noted when talking about A Few Good Men. In the 1960 film The Little Shop of Horrors, Nicholson is listed fourteenth in the opening credits, behind such names as Leola Wendorff, Lynn Storey, and Jack Warford.

Garry W. Tallent has been playing bass with a cool calmness off to the side for Bruce Springsteen for more than fifty years (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

My fondness for not-major-stars even extends to rock bands, where I feel an affinity for bass players, who usually remain quiet and stay in the background. “I didn’t really want to be in the spotlight. In a way, I’m in the wrong profession: I’m reticent to be pushed forward,” longtime E Street Band bassist Garry W. Tallent told the Wall Street Journal in November 2012. When I saw Springsteen and the band at the Meadowlands last week, Garry remained in his usual spot onstage while Bruce, saxophonist Jake Clemons, guitarists Nils Lofgren and Little Steven, and violinist Soozie Tyrell made their way down the steps, moving their way forward onto a platform that reached into the crowd.

I’m probably attracted to character actors and bass players because for the first half of my life on this planet, I preferred to remain quiet and stay in the background. I hovered in corners at parties, watching everyone else enjoy themselves. I never raised my hand in class, terrified of being called on — not because I didn’t know the answer but because I didn’t want everyone staring at me all at the same time. I had no idea how to talk to girls, so I became their friend and confidant, rarely a romantic partner. In intramural basketball and street hockey, I was much better at defense, never the big scorer. I dreaded being the center of attention; at my surprise thirtieth birthday party, I tried to walk out as soon as I walked in, but my family convinced me not to leave.

Character actor Brion James was a perennial go-to villain in movies for decades.

I relate to what Brion James (Blade Runner, 48 Hrs., Dead Man Walking) once said; he is one of those actors you’ve seen again and again but have no idea what his name is: “I’m a character actor, so I don’t take the hit if the movie’s bad; the lead does. So, I don’t want to be the lead. He takes the hit, I don’t.” More avoidance, as I’ve written about before.

Even now, I write about other people creating art rather than making that art myself. At my day job, I am an executive managing editor, guiding children’s books that other people wrote, from manuscript to publication.

Meanwhile, I don’t do selfies and stopped asking for autographs when I was a teenager, so I don’t have any physical proof that any of these encounters happened, just fond memories.

My two favorite shows, The Twilight Zone and Barney Miller, both featured a slew of lesser-known actors portraying different characters in multiple episodes — Vaughn Taylor, John Anderson, J. Pat O’Malley, Cyril Delevanti, Barney Phillips in the former, Kenneth Tigar, Oliver Clark, James Cromwell, Leonard Stone, Doris Roberts, and O’Malley again in the latter, with Harold J. Stone starring in a TZ episode and playing minor roles in two multipart BM episodes.

In Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, I’m thrilled to see Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, and Jason Robards, but I get giddy when Jack Elam (who appeared in more than two hundred movies and television programs, including The Twilight Zone) and Lionel Stander (137 appearances) are onscreen. Most film lovers can easily identify five of the Magnificent Seven, but how many know the other two? I do.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t adore Wallace Shawn, the character actor and playwright who has appeared in such films as My Dinner with Andre, The Princess Bride, and the Toy Story franchise. I pointed out in July that I had bumped into him on the street (one of several times I’ve met him), as well as Richard Kind; in the Woody Allen film Rifkin’s Festival, Shawn plays Mort Rifkin and Kind plays his father, Max Rifkin, my grandfather’s name. When I saw Shawn in Chelsea, he was carrying groceries and wearing a mask; I regret not having said something to him about the Masked Avenger, the radio hero he plays in Woody’s 1987 Radio Days.

“In real life, every person is the leading man or woman,” Shawn once explained. “We don’t think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.”

After my wife and I saw a Broadway show in 2012, fans were flocking around Jon Hamm, preening resplendently in a fabulously tailored suit. I instead turned toward character actor supreme Ed Begley Jr., the son of Oscar- and Tony-winning and Emmy-nominated character actor Ed Begley (Sweet Bird of Youth, 12 Angry Men).

“Leave him alone,” my wife implored as she went over to check out Hamm. I approached Begley anyway and congratulated him on the season two finale of Portlandia, in which one of his characters, the café owner (he also plays a priest, a doctor, and Wes), becomes a major player.

“It aired already? They were supposed to send it to me,” he said, a bit angry and confused.

“It was on last night,” I said.

“Was I any good?” he asked with a smile.

“You were great!” I replied.

One of my favorite interactions involved James Karen. When I was growing up, he was famous as the Pathmark Guy, the pitchman for the tristate-area supermarket chain from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. It was hard to have a day go by without seeing him touting Pathmark’s low prices. But by the time he died in 2018 at the age of ninety-four, he had appeared in more than two hundred movies and TV shows, including such films as Poltergeist, The China Syndrome, Mulholland Dr., and The Unborn, which earned him a Fangoria Chainsaw Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

“Excuse me, Mr. Karen,” I began. He and his wife were standing behind my wife and me on line to see the Lord & Taylor holiday window display.

He seemed shocked that I had used his real name and hadn’t called him the Pathmark Guy.

“Oh my god, in Return of the Living Dead, when you take that baseball bat and smash that zombie’s head off, that was amazing,” I said. Karen received a Saturn Award nod for Best Actor for the role.

He suddenly stood up taller and beamed with pride.

“Why, thank you so much,” he said. “That was a lot of fun to do.”

Talking to these character actors is a lot of fun for me, especially when I don’t go for the obvious and instead bring up something unique and unusual in their career.

I guess I identify with them and their approach and dedication to their chosen profession, and to life.

“I was always a character actress and never a sex symbol. Even when I was the leading lady, I was a character actor,” Shirley MacLaine said. I saw the Oscar and Emmy winner on the subway a few years ago and showered her with a few seconds of love and admiration that she seemed not to mind.

Elegant actor Louis Jourdan — one of my favorite Draculas ever, although we never met — summed it up best for me when he admitted, “I would rather be called a character actor than a star.”

[Follow Mark Rifkin and This Week in New York every day here.]