The one thing Ed Harris hates being called: “What else are you fucking doing?”
Legend has it that on the set of 1976 thriller Marathon Man, Dustin Hoffman had gone so deep into method acting for his character that he stayed up for three days straight to appear sufficiently exhausted, prompting his co-star Laurence Olivier to retort, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
It would seem Apollo 13 and The Abyss star Ed Harris subscribes to a similar way of thinking about the craft. New Jersey-born Harris has worked in mainstream movies consistently since the late 1970s and broke through thanks to an epic film that quite simply doesn’t get spoken about enough when it comes to some of the best movies ever made. 1983’s The Right Stuff was a towering achievement, with a running time of three hours and 12 minutes; it told the story of the Mercury Seven, the men selected to pilot the first human spaceflights by the United States.
Harris was superb as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, and really should have been nominated for a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar alongside Sam Shepard. But the movie, despite being a box office flop, put him on the map in Hollywood, and he picked up more roles over the next few years, including a movie with Goldie Hawn called Swing Shift, and then the Robert De Niro movie Jacknife, winning a Golden Globe nomination.
His first major lead role came with James Cameron’s underwater sci-fi The Abyss in 1989, playing an oil platform chief in the film, which won an Oscar for ‘Best Visual Effects’. His stature in the industry was growing, but it was the 1990s that would represent his peak. In the ten years after The Abyss, he made hit after hit, and the two films that are most synonymous with him as a character actor.
Not that you would catch him using that term. He once told the LA Times, “The whole term ‘character acting’ to me is one I really hate. What else are you fucking doing? You are playing a character. That’s what acting is! If you are not playing a character, you are playing a movie star in a movie.”
Harris was undoubtedly a movie star by 1996; however, when he returned to space to line up alongside Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, the Ron Howard movie that landed Harris an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. And two years later came probably his defining career role, in the magnificent The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey.
Harris gave a masterclass as Christof, the paternal creator of the universe that Carrey’s Truman is eventually so desperate to escape, and he deservedly won a Golden Globe for the movie in addition to his third Oscar nomination.
On his approach to parts like that, Harris added, “I play characters, whether it’s a lead role or supporting role, whatever it might be. I don’t feel like I’m doing me. I think it’s more frightening to say you’re not going to play a character, you’re going to be this guy. I like characters.”
For the next 25 years, he has continued to do exactly that, taking on roles in blockbuster movies like Top Gun: Maverick and more challenging fare like Kristen Stewart’s Love Lies Bleeding. Now, like most actors in the industry, he has recently found his way into a Taylor Sheridan TV creation, this time the Yellowstone spin-off Dutton Ranch, alongside Kelly Reilly.
