The ‘Saving Private Ryan’ actor who kept ruining their only scene: “I was so tense, so nervous”
The principal cast of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan might be restricted to the close-knit band of soldiers venturing behind enemy lines and the titular surviving sibling they’ve been dispatched to rescue, but the classic World War II epic is stealthily packed with a surprising array of recognisable names.
Rewatching the movie after not seeing it for a few years has led many viewers to recreate the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme in their living rooms: Is that Ted Danson? What is Bryan Cranston doing here? Isn’t that Opie from Sons of Anarchy? Look, it’s perennial ‘That Guy from That Thing’ actor Leland Orser.
Andrew Scott has a very small role that would have been bigger had Disney not gotten in his way, with future Academy Award nominee and character actor extraordinaire, Paul Giamatti, popping up for a single scene. The latter wished he had a bigger part, but one person who probably didn’t was Nathan Fillion.
At the time, he’d been in precisely one feature film, which was released four years before Saving Private Ryan. His breakthrough role in the sitcom Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place premiered four months before Spielberg’s masterpiece hit cinemas, so he was best known for his recurring gig in the soap opera One Life to Live when he turned up on the set.
He’s only got scant minutes of screentime, and his character isn’t even credited properly (Fillion’s James Frederick Ryan is merely listed as ‘Minnesota Ryan’), but the case of mistaken identity that befalls the fresh-faced soldier was a pivotal one that sharpened the emotional stakes. Even though he claimed he could cry on command, it didn’t work out that way when the cameras were rolling.
“All I had to do was cry,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s all I did on that soap opera. I could cry at the drop of a hat. But I was so tense, so nervous. Steven Spielberg was very encouraging. He said, ‘You’re acting it, but whatever you’re feeling, it’s not coming out’. And then he told everyone to take five.”
After ruining multiple takes by failing to produce the waterworks, Fillion and Spielberg went for a leisurely stroll around the set. The filmmaker passed on some sage words of wisdom, and he was suddenly an actor reborn. “He gave me all these things to think about,” he recalled. “And I just started crying on the spot.”
Having been shaken out of his tearless stupor by one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever directors, Fillion was ready to bawl like a baby. He nailed it on the very next take, and his work was done. Just because an actor is a bit-part player, it doesn’t mean they can’t struggle to make the most of their minutes, and he was certainly feeling the pressure of trying to get those tears flowing.
