The 2002 role Clancy Brown called the single “stupidest thing” that happened in his career
As one of the most ubiquitous ‘that guy’ actors in modern Hollywood, it takes a special role to stand out for Clancy Brown as the most painfully overlooked performance of his prolific career.
While the stars usually take most of the plaudits, the film and television industry wouldn’t survive without character actors, especially the ones who pop everywhere to such a degree that, even if you don’t know their name, you still instantly recognise them as ‘that guy from that thing you’ve seen‘.
And, as far as ‘those guys from those things that you’ve seen’ go, Brown is one of the best in the business. For the last 40 years and change, he’s developed a habit for appearing in stone-cold classics, cult favourites, box office behemoths, unsung gems, and, inevitably, the odd cinematic atrocity or two.
With Highlander, The Shawshank Redemption, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Starship Troopers, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Promising Young Woman, Thor: Ragnarok, The Mandalorian, and, of course, SpongeBob SquarePants among his voluminous credits, it’s an understatement to say that he’s been around the block and back more than most.
If you need an actor with an effortless sense of gravitas to bring a lived-in authenticity to an antagonist of any kind, or even the occasional kindly father figure, then Brown is your guy. With that in mind, it must take something particularly special or memorable to stand out from his 350+ film and television outings as the single most underrated effort of his onscreen endeavours.
Fittingly, it’s something that many folks may have never even known existed. In July 2002, the drama series Breaking News quietly premiered on Bravo, with the show following the trials and tribulations of a fictional 24-hour news network in Milwaukee. Brown played Peter Kozyck, and he doesn’t think it got a fair share of the stick.
“Breaking News should’ve gone on,” he insisted. “It would’ve been a huge hit TV show if it had gotten on the TV at all.” Unfortunately, it premiered a month after Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom debuted on HBO, which covered many of the same bases, and 13 episodes later, Brown’s series was cancelled.
“It got caught up in the corporate shenanigans,” the actor lamented. “AOL had just bought Time-Warner and said that they were going to cut the budget, so what they did was just axe a bunch of shows that were already shot! It was the stupidest thing they could possibly do.”
Ironically, Breaking News was only relevant for a brief moment before nobody cared. Once it was taken off the airwaves, whatever small dent it made in the cultural consciousness quickly healed, but Brown has never forgotten the stupidity of taking a series and a role he was so invested in away from him.
