Emmett Walsh in Blood Simple Photo: Getty
“You act out something and you have 12 tasks; if they have me, then they only have 11 problems.” That's what the late, great Emmett Walsh said about the gallery of roles he got. Take police veteran Captain Bryant in Blade Runner (1982), a character whose whole purpose is to give orders to Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard.
His opening scene could have been dry and functional: he had to explain that he was on the loose, talk about the lifespan of these escaped replicants, and give Deckard no choice in their hunt. In script parlance, he is a dog's body — an exposition device.
Walsh's casting certainly changed the role. He looks like he's been slowly rotting at this table for years. He automatically pours himself and Deckard a jelly bean and seems to catch him with a sardonic, obsequious grin that might quickly disappear. In his hands, policing could hardly be more seedy.
Walsh has played hundreds of film and television roles and brought such value to them all. It is difficult to imagine a more consummate American character actor in terms of understanding the required craft. Roger Ebert, who called Walsh «the poet of meanness,» ranked him in the same category as Harry Dean Stanton; indeed, he came up with the so-called “Stanton-Walsh Rule,” which stated that no film in which a particular character plays a supporting role “can be completely bad.”
There were only a few times when Walsh was given extravagant roles with multiple scenes in which to act out, and he never lost a minute. In the Coen brothers' powerful debut film Blood Simple (1984), he plays a private investigator named Lauren Visser, who wears a cowboy hat, tie, and the signature yellow suit in which he is destined to die.
The man's Texas accent is a disheveled drawl, and his moral bankruptcy is complete. After confirming to cuckold Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) that his wife is having a torrid affair, he goes one step further and goes to the bar Marty owns, brings him detailed photos of the affair for no apparent reason, and relaxes to enjoy his humiliation.
This scene is a perfect representation of Walsh at his best and takes us on a journey. We start it off even more suspensefully with Hedaya, who, as expected, plays Marty as an enraged mobster ready to blow his head off, and tries to scare Visser in a roundabout way by threatening to behead the envoy.
Willem Dafoe and Emmett Walsh in “White Sands”
Watching Walsh absorb and deflect the threat changes this dynamic 180°. He giggles madly, gurglingly: “This is very, very good!” and collects his things one by one to waddle towards the exit. “Call me if you want to cut my head off,” he says calmly as he says goodbye. “I can always crawl without him…” He skips to the door, takes one last drag on his cigarette and cackles to himself, ends the scene, chews it, spits it out, and some more. In these few moments, Visser proves that he is no lackey: he has acquired the status of a disgusting enemy who will play a much more deadly role than we imagined.
I was lucky enough to see Walsh on stage once when he starred in Sam Shepard's revival of Buried Child in London in 2004. He spends much of the play, set in a dilapidated farmhouse in Illinois, stretched out on a dirty sofa, wearing suspenders over a dirty white vest and a red baseball cap.
The hero, Dodge, is a dying alcoholic whose farm and legacy are destroyed. Walsh embodied him as an icon of flyover decrepitude, a kind of Grandfather Americana. Right in the title lies a terrible secret that the play barely keeps: long ago, he and his wife were cuckolded by their own son, and they had a child, whom he killed and got rid of.
He shows no guilt about this, sneaking drinks from under the couch and unsuccessfully managing his barren estate. Walsh sagged and slurred beautifully: he was one with the furniture, a sunken ship disappearing before our eyes. It would be completely wrong to praise his vitality in this role. He brought exactly what was needed: quite the opposite.
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