Scott Wilson had one of my favorite kinds of careers: the Reliably Great Character Actor For Decades and Decades kind of career.
He started off in 1967 with the one-two punch of In the Heat of the Night, playing murder suspect Harvey Oberst, and – playing another murderer – in In Cold Blood. Since then, scanning his resume on IMDB, you can see he did a couple of movies a year – sometimes more – ever since. There were no fallow periods. Just this year, he showed up in Hostiles, where he had only one scene, but he was terrifying (it also represented a small reunion with Wes Studi, whom he also worked with in Geronimo).
I love the scene he has with Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, when – after paying lip service to gender equality in order to pacify the activist politicians in D.C. – he lets her know how he really feels in a private meeting in his office.
Smoking a cigar, completely secure in his position of power, he says he resents having to keep a gynecologist on staff to keep track of “your personal Pap smears.” It’s so ugly it makes the breath hitch in your throat.
The disgust Wilson puts into those four words is so intense it actually made me – watching the movie – feel a flash of shame – even though I was just an audience member AND I know intellectually that men like this are wrong, and dumb, and an enemy I look forward to defeating. But that’s the power of acting. He had such contempt for her female body he enjoyed sneering at it – and its natural processes. (Not to mention the fact that “pap smears” are essential to women’s health and he makes them sound like a dirty gross word.) He never once raises his voice. He doesn’t rant and rave. He doesn’t have to.
It’s one of those moments where you go “Oh, okay, so THIS is the real enemy. Not organizations that won’t let women in like the SEALs. It’s men like THIS. Instutionalized misogyny.” You wouldn’t have that response as an audience member without the tightly coiled performance of Scott Wilson.
Character actors … as I’ve written before – in my piece on Bruce McGill, my piece on Thomas Mitchell for Film Comment: Character actors are the ones who have to do what I call the “thematic heavy lifting.” The stars have other concerns: creating a character, the character’s behavior, going through the full arc of the story. But character actors – like Scott Wilson in G.I. Jane (just one example) have to come in and illustrate/underline/represent the Theme of the whole thing. And they have 10 minutes to do it in. Not 2 hours like the stars have.
Good character actors are like clutch hitters or closing pitchers. You gotta come up BIG and you have to do it under pressure with very little time. There are many scenes in G.I. Jane showing her struggles to prove herself, to keep up with the men, to break down stereotypes… but in that scene with Scott Wilson you see what she – and all of us – are really up against.
That’s how you play a scene.
He had a career of great integrity. R.I.P. Scott Wilson.
Did he not play Myrtle’s husband (first name?) Wilson in the 1974 Great Gatsby? Also he was Scott Crossfield in The Right Stuff. I always felt that his portrayal of Crossfield was poignant and am not not sure why, but he looked at Glennis (Barbara Hershey) so wistfully I read sadness and renunciation into it. A true character actor is rare, but Scott Wilson was one of them.
Yes! Gatsby and Right Stuff!
Interesting observations in re: Right Stuff – I know just what you are saying! I found his work to be very poignant there too. He always had that extra layer going on, it was always three-dimensional what he was doing – even in a clearly “bad guy” role like the one in GI Jane. He understood what men like this had at stake – the entire structure of patriarchy – he embodied it so strongly you can’t get away from it. He’s not exactly a villain – just a guy who does not want women around, cannot afford to change his ways – because then the whole house of cards will come down.
Same thing with his one scene in Hostiles – from earlier this year. I mean, the character is reprehensible. Total racist, violent, and unbending – a man you cannot negotiate with. And that’s really the point of the scene – anyone with any interest in nuance, subtlety or clemency towards the native people … will have to contend with racists like that guy. And he WENT for it. It’s a great scene – very upsetting and very important, thematically. He often got to play such scenes!
So interesting to read about his “bad guy” roles! I knew him from Walking Dead, where he played Lauren Cohan’s father, a truly gentle man, but with a spine of iron. I always appreciated the tension he brought to that role, generosity coupled with a dangerous old-world patriarchy. He held onto both, which felt very real.
Sounds like a beautiful performance – so many people have been mentioning Walking Dead on my FB post! A beloved character sounds like.