Men who make me happy #4: William Fichtner
With Invasion set to premiere tomorrow night (my TiVo better not fail me, which it has been doing lately constantly and of course there's no way to tell TiVo how unhappy I am because they no longer have any way to reach them except by the worst voice mail system on the planet), I am reminded that I've been remiss in singing the praises of one of my favorite actors... largely because whenever I do sing his praises, most of the time I'm met with either "Who?" or "Ew!" As you can imagine, this tends to discourage me from saying much about William Fichtner.
Fichtner's (and yes, I almost always call him that, and it's pronounced fik-ner, with the T only barely sounded) one of those journeymen actors who rarely ever gets a lead role, and has only once been in a romantic leading role in a movie (an awful film with Demi Moore but it makes me happy nonetheless), but is always in the main cast, doing good work, stealing scenes from the leads. Sadly, the most well-known movies he's been in he's usually playing a bad guy, but his looks are not the standard hottie Hollywood type, so of course he plays bad guys. He's very, very good at being sinister in a polite, charming, insinuating way, so movies like The Longest Yard remake or Strange Days (where he said nearly nothing but was one creepy dude) will usually pick up on that. He's tall, too, with a kind of pointy face, high forehead, and goggly eyes, and that will say "bad guy" to the suits in Hollywood like nothing else.
But he's used that ability to play really weird and off-kilter guys to great advantage in a lot of indie movies, especially the pervy, freaky cop in Go, and the place I first saw him, the TV sitcom Grace Under Fire, where he played Grace's mad-scientist type boyfriend, Ryan Sparks. They really amped up his weirdness factor with crazy wardrobe choices and standup Eraserhead hair, and the character was so odd and edgy and funny that I fell madly in love, and have followed his career ever since. (Also, he reminded me in that role of a cleaned-up, nearly normal brother of the hissing creepy guy with the president's finger in Escape from New York, and how can you resist someone who reminds you of creepy finger hissing guy? I ask you.) Some folks discovered him even earlier on the soap As the World Turns. What I think most people would remember him from are two space-themed blockbusters, one that I despise -- Armageddon -- and one that I love -- Contact. In Armageddon, he gets what I consider one of the best lines ever ("Boy, talk about the wrong stuff!") and IMO, the single worst line of dialog ever on film when he tells Liv Tyler he wants to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man he's ever known (seriously, it hurts me to write that). That he could deliver both those lines in such a crapfest with such aplomb made me love him all the more.
And even though he's the saintly blind guy in Contact, it picks up on something about him that many other movies (Black Hawk Down, Perfect Storm, The Underneath, Crash, Go, Equilibrium) have as well, which is a kind of ambiguity about what he really is: good or bad. In Black Hawk Down, one of my favorites of his roles, he has a very heroic, almost sweet quality, but there's also that little bit of cowboy in him when he's facing off with Jason Isaacs's character. He gives off a vibe that says you never really know where he's going to go -- maybe he'll continue to smile at you, or maybe he will gut you with a hidden knife. And I think Invasion is playing off that, even though I've seen only one clip so far with him in it. He plays the sort of bad guy sheriff, a role he's definitely played before, but it will be interesting to see what he does with it.
One of my biggest heartbreaks a few years ago, in a season of television that I think might have been the best fall ever and was filled with heartbreak cancellations, was the series he did with John Hannah (the two of them in my icon are the characters) called MDs, which ABC promptly cancelled with six remaining eps we've never seen. To say it was a slasher's dream come true would be putting it mildly; it was so slashy that the TWoP recappers and message boards were filled with things like "Why can't Fichtner and Hannah have a shower scene every week?" answered by "That's a question that keeps us up at nights, too." They had showers together, they had random scenes together for no reason other than that the powers felt they needed to constantly put the two together, even if their jobs had nothing to do with each other, and there seemed to be some kind of obligation to end each episode with the two of them having a deeply felt talk in the locker room or on the building roof... just because. When one of them was done with surgery for the day, the other would just step in and help him, because then they could spend more time together. It was almost comical in its slashiness. And someone on the production team at least had the sense to recognize that maybe Fichtner doesn't have the most drop-dead good looks, but he does have a drop-dead bod, because they frequently featured him in various stages of undress, or in drapey sweats that showed off his assets, and of course the scrubs with the short sleeves so we could see his muscles. Which are lovely. Trust me.
He loves playing weird characters, though, so it's something I have to weigh when I see his stuff -- do I want to watch him playing a freaky detective who looks and acts like a cross between Carol Channing and Truman Capote? Can I handle it if he's playing yet another racist, vicious cop who's going to try to kill the hero? It's always a crapshoot with Fichtner! I'm glad that he's back on weekly TV, and this is a series that nearly everyone has said is sure to be a standout of the season, so I'm hopeful that maybe his character will get more depth. I have no love for ABC, and until Lost became a hit, their support for genre was... crappy doesn't begin to describe it. I will keep my fingers crossed. It's going to be the young studly guy who gets all the media attention, but I'm willing to wager that such a professional scene-stealer as Fichtner will end up being the character the viewers talk about most.
Fichtner's (and yes, I almost always call him that, and it's pronounced fik-ner, with the T only barely sounded) one of those journeymen actors who rarely ever gets a lead role, and has only once been in a romantic leading role in a movie (an awful film with Demi Moore but it makes me happy nonetheless), but is always in the main cast, doing good work, stealing scenes from the leads. Sadly, the most well-known movies he's been in he's usually playing a bad guy, but his looks are not the standard hottie Hollywood type, so of course he plays bad guys. He's very, very good at being sinister in a polite, charming, insinuating way, so movies like The Longest Yard remake or Strange Days (where he said nearly nothing but was one creepy dude) will usually pick up on that. He's tall, too, with a kind of pointy face, high forehead, and goggly eyes, and that will say "bad guy" to the suits in Hollywood like nothing else.
But he's used that ability to play really weird and off-kilter guys to great advantage in a lot of indie movies, especially the pervy, freaky cop in Go, and the place I first saw him, the TV sitcom Grace Under Fire, where he played Grace's mad-scientist type boyfriend, Ryan Sparks. They really amped up his weirdness factor with crazy wardrobe choices and standup Eraserhead hair, and the character was so odd and edgy and funny that I fell madly in love, and have followed his career ever since. (Also, he reminded me in that role of a cleaned-up, nearly normal brother of the hissing creepy guy with the president's finger in Escape from New York, and how can you resist someone who reminds you of creepy finger hissing guy? I ask you.) Some folks discovered him even earlier on the soap As the World Turns. What I think most people would remember him from are two space-themed blockbusters, one that I despise -- Armageddon -- and one that I love -- Contact. In Armageddon, he gets what I consider one of the best lines ever ("Boy, talk about the wrong stuff!") and IMO, the single worst line of dialog ever on film when he tells Liv Tyler he wants to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man he's ever known (seriously, it hurts me to write that). That he could deliver both those lines in such a crapfest with such aplomb made me love him all the more.
And even though he's the saintly blind guy in Contact, it picks up on something about him that many other movies (Black Hawk Down, Perfect Storm, The Underneath, Crash, Go, Equilibrium) have as well, which is a kind of ambiguity about what he really is: good or bad. In Black Hawk Down, one of my favorites of his roles, he has a very heroic, almost sweet quality, but there's also that little bit of cowboy in him when he's facing off with Jason Isaacs's character. He gives off a vibe that says you never really know where he's going to go -- maybe he'll continue to smile at you, or maybe he will gut you with a hidden knife. And I think Invasion is playing off that, even though I've seen only one clip so far with him in it. He plays the sort of bad guy sheriff, a role he's definitely played before, but it will be interesting to see what he does with it.
One of my biggest heartbreaks a few years ago, in a season of television that I think might have been the best fall ever and was filled with heartbreak cancellations, was the series he did with John Hannah (the two of them in my icon are the characters) called MDs, which ABC promptly cancelled with six remaining eps we've never seen. To say it was a slasher's dream come true would be putting it mildly; it was so slashy that the TWoP recappers and message boards were filled with things like "Why can't Fichtner and Hannah have a shower scene every week?" answered by "That's a question that keeps us up at nights, too." They had showers together, they had random scenes together for no reason other than that the powers felt they needed to constantly put the two together, even if their jobs had nothing to do with each other, and there seemed to be some kind of obligation to end each episode with the two of them having a deeply felt talk in the locker room or on the building roof... just because. When one of them was done with surgery for the day, the other would just step in and help him, because then they could spend more time together. It was almost comical in its slashiness. And someone on the production team at least had the sense to recognize that maybe Fichtner doesn't have the most drop-dead good looks, but he does have a drop-dead bod, because they frequently featured him in various stages of undress, or in drapey sweats that showed off his assets, and of course the scrubs with the short sleeves so we could see his muscles. Which are lovely. Trust me.
He loves playing weird characters, though, so it's something I have to weigh when I see his stuff -- do I want to watch him playing a freaky detective who looks and acts like a cross between Carol Channing and Truman Capote? Can I handle it if he's playing yet another racist, vicious cop who's going to try to kill the hero? It's always a crapshoot with Fichtner! I'm glad that he's back on weekly TV, and this is a series that nearly everyone has said is sure to be a standout of the season, so I'm hopeful that maybe his character will get more depth. I have no love for ABC, and until Lost became a hit, their support for genre was... crappy doesn't begin to describe it. I will keep my fingers crossed. It's going to be the young studly guy who gets all the media attention, but I'm willing to wager that such a professional scene-stealer as Fichtner will end up being the character the viewers talk about most.