{"id":139884,"date":"2018-10-07T14:58:01","date_gmt":"2018-10-07T18:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=139884"},"modified":"2018-10-07T16:26:31","modified_gmt":"2018-10-07T20:26:31","slug":"r-i-p-scott-wilson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=139884","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Scott Wilson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nScott Wilson had one of my favorite kinds of careers: the Reliably Great Character Actor For Decades and Decades kind of career. <\/p>\n

He started off in 1967 with the one-two punch of In the Heat of the Night<\/i>, playing murder suspect Harvey Oberst, and – playing another murderer – in In Cold Blood<\/i>. 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<\/i>, 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>). <\/p>\n

I love the scene he has with Demi Moore in G.I. Jane<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\nSmoking a cigar, completely secure in his position of power, he says he resents having to keep a gynecologist on staff to keep track of \u201cyour personal Pap smears.\u201d It\u2019s so ugly it makes the breath hitch in your throat. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t rant and rave. He doesn\u2019t have to. <\/p>\n

It’s one of those moments where you go \u201cOh, okay, so THIS is the real enemy. Not organizations that won\u2019t let women in like the SEALs. It’s men like THIS. Instutionalized misogyny.\u201d You wouldn\u2019t have that response as an audience member without the tightly coiled performance of Scott Wilson. <\/p>\n

Character actors … as I\u2019ve written before – in my piece on Bruce McGill<\/a>, my piece on Thomas Mitchell for Film Comment<\/em>: Character actors are the ones who have to do what I call the \u201cthematic heavy lifting.\u201d 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<\/i> (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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

That’s how you play a scene. <\/p>\n

He had a career of great integrity. R.I.P. Scott Wilson. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139884"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139899,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139884\/revisions\/139899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}