It's that guy again: why bit-part actors are Hollywood's most essential workers

Jack Nicholson with one of cinema's most vivid and unsettling supporting characters, Joe Turkel in The Shining. Photo / Getty Images

You might not think you know Joe Turkel. But if you've spent much time in the Overlook Hotel or post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, his face will surely ring a bell. Turkel, who died last month at the age of 94, worked steadily in Hollywood for 50 years, though in that time he played a total of zero leads. Turkel's name was never emblazoned on trailers or posters: in fact, in more than a third of his film and television appearances, it wasn't even included in the credits.

Yet his work in The Shining and Blade Runner – in which he respectively played the ghostly bartender Lloyd and the technology baron Dr Eldon Tyrell – gave him a presence every bit as towering as the stars to whose scenes he brought an eerie, ominous edge. With his gaunt, still features and thin, ambiguous smile, Turkel was one of the great bit-part actors – those lower-profile players to whom canny directors turn when they need a certain mood or tone only one face, voice or demeanour can yield.

Turkel was a favourite of Stanley Kubrick's, who cast him in small but pivotal roles in The Killing, Paths of Glory and lastly The Shining, in which he pours Jack Nicholson a Bourbon and listens quietly to him tipsily unburden himself about – well, let's say various domestic stresses and strains. Turkel's screen time totals barely 60 seconds, yet this is more than long enough for him to create one of cinema's most vivid and unsettling supporting characters.

R.I.P., Joe Turkel, who passed away at 94. pic.twitter.com/JJE5oeUHhg

— The Playlist (@ThePlaylistNews) July 1, 2022

Lloyd was career-making for Turkel, yet he almost lost it to Harry Dean Stanton: perhaps the most illustrious of the entire bit-part breed. Stanton was always eye-catching even in the slightest of roles, but during the 1970s rise of New Hollywood he found a kind of anti-superstardom thanks to his extraordinary face – craggy and crumpled, but also tender, noble and pained.

In Ridley Scott's Alien (the film he skipped The Shining for), he had just 16 minutes of screen time: a lot more than a bit, but still less than any other cast member, unless you count the chap in the alien suit. Still, in his 16 minutes as Samuel Brett, the drooling adult xenomorph's first victim, Stanton brought a leathery credibility to the Nostromo's mission: he made space travel look like haulage.

Among Stanton's many admirers was Wim Wenders, who cast him in a rare but unforgettable lead role in Paris, Texas. Another was David Lynch, whose ability to channel the power of the bit-part is virtually unrivalled. Many Lynch films feel haunted by characters only with us for mere minutes: think of Robert Blake's vampiric party guest in Lost Highway, Grace Zabriskie's unannounced visitor in Inland Empire, or Laurel Near's lady in the radiator in Eraserhead.

In Mulholland Drive, Patrick Fischler's nervous diner patron is on screen for a little over 200 seconds – but the actor's unforgettable portrayal of creeping, unfathomable dread helps turn this short standalone scene into arguably the film's definitive sequence.

Fischler took on a certain charge from that role – a sort of noirish paranoia, which bled into much of his subsequent work. It was in his more substantial parts on Lost and Mad Men, and almost used as a callback in his more fleeting appearances in other films that dug into Los Angeles's weird old secret corners, like The Black Dahlia, Hail, Caesar! and Under the Silver Lake.

Patrick Fischler in Mulholland Drive. Photo / @EirlingurEinars, Twitter

Lynch would deploy Fischler again, perfectly, in the third series of Twin Peaks as a fretful casino executive: it was like watching an artist pull a half-squeezed tube of paint from his drawer, after remembering just how well it had served him on that earlier canvas.

That's not to say the best single-scene players are just glorified props. To remain in circulation over decades, useful to directors whose signature styles couldn't be further apart, takes dedication and talent. Philip Baker Hall, who died last month aged 90, spent more than a decade surfacing here and there before playing Richard Nixon for Robert Altman in the one-man historical drama Secret Honour.

It didn't make him a star overnight, but caught the eye of a young aspiring filmmaker called Paul Thomas Anderson – who a little over a decade later would cast him in the short he would later expand into his 1996 debut feature, the gambling thriller Hard Eight. That unlocked things: Hall took a string of brief but memorable roles in enormous films like The Rock, Air Force One, The Truman Show and Rush Hour, as well as Anderson's own Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

Since the first flickerings of the prestige television era, the glut of content has made the categories of bit-part player and character actor increasingly porous: these days you can both, and a star into the bargain. Yes, that's Omar Sy, hero of Netflix's Lupin, in a glorified cameo as Chris Pratt's old raptor-training colleague in the latest Jurassic World. And during Top Gun: Maverick, if you're really paying attention, you might spot one of the stars of The Good Place, Manny Jacinto, as one of the trainee pilots.

Meanwhile, the internet has made it easier for appreciative audiences to identify and track those recurring interesting faces. Dick Miller, a bit-part stalwart whose six-decade career took in more than 180 films, was even the subject of a documentary in 2012, which discussed his work for the likes of Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Samuel Fuller and, on 18 separate occasions, Joe Dante. (He was the slow plough driver in Gremlins; the bookshop owner in The Howling; the taxi driver in Innerspace; one of the dustmen in The 'Burbs.)

Yet Miller's plump CV is positively waif-like next to that of Stephen Tobolowsky, whose 280 credits across film and television in the last 45 years borders on ludicrous. Again, the name might not be familiar, but some of the characters are indelible: the awful Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day, the anxious amnesiac Sammy Jankis in Memento, the psychopathy buff Dr Lamott in Basic Instinct.

Harry Dean Stanton in Alien. Photo / Getty Images

If the 71-year-old Tobolowsky plans to retire by his 80th birthday, he just has to make another 40 films per year – plus another 10 during a quiet patch – to come close to equalling James Hong. Born to first-generation Chinese immigrants, Hong is thought to have played more than 650 roles since the 1950s, including the villainous Lo-Pan in Big Trouble in Little China, Fay Dunaway's Butler in Chinatown, and Blade Runner's eyeball technician Hannibal Chew. And his casting in the recent cult-hit multiverse comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once seemed a wily nod to a career spent pinballing between parallel realities.

The men above have enjoyed full and varied careers, but one suspects being male was a useful advantage. Margo Martindale, Dale Dickey and Beth Grant are among the notable outliers – you'll almost certainly recognise all three. But when it's widely acknowledged that the film industry loses interest in women once they pass the age of 40, what hope can there be of jobbing actresses cropping up regularly into their 70s and beyond? Cinema is littered with – and all the richer for – an abundance of That Guys. But its shortage of Her Agains shouldn't be overlooked.