William H Macy once named the greatest actor he ever worked with: “The best of us”
When you talk about the best character actors of the past few decades, William H Macy has to be in the discussion. He’s been going since the late 1970s, rarely getting the leading role but always adding quality to any cast and eventually owning a massive show with the influential US remake of Shameless.
A favourite of the Coen Brothers, Macy had spent the 1980s on a mix of network TV shows before the Coens gave him an uncredited role on the John Turturro and John Goodman black comedy Barton Fink in 1991. Many more TV roles and small movie parts followed until, in 1996, the brothers once again cast him, this time as the lead in the small-town crime classic Fargo, a role which Macy convinced them simply couldn’t be played by anyone else.
That proved to be the actor’s breakthrough; it was a huge hit, picking up seven Oscar nominations, including ‘Best Actor’ for Macy, and eventually winning two. The following year, Macy appeared in two more major movies, firstly the Harrison Ford action thriller Air Force One and then Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut, the porn drama Boogie Nights.
Undoubtedly one of Macy’s most memorable roles, he played ‘Little Bill’, an assistant director sick and tired of his wife’s open infidelity who eventually cracks in explosive fashion. Boogie Nights was a global hit and was also the first of three films Macy would work on alongside Philip Seymour-Hoffman, who would also appear in a Coen Brothers movie, The Big Lebowski, a year later.
And Macy has no doubt that Seymour-Hoffman was a unique talent, recalling not just Boogie Nights but also a little-remembered 2000 comedy film directed by David Mamet called State and Main, which starred the pair alongside Sarah Jessica Parker and Alec Baldwin.
Discussing Seymour-Hoffman, Macy told Variety, “He was the best of us; he was never bad. And I don’t know if it’s just looking back, but I now see that he was in pain. I think the weight of living was heavier on Phil than it is on other people. We were on a panel together, I think, at Sundance with State and Main, and somebody asked about preparation. I don’t do a lot of preparation; everything I need is in the script.”
Adding, “(But) Phil disagreed. He said, ‘No, I think there are things you can do to get into the world. Whatever’s going on, you’ve got to find it in yourself, and I think you have to submerge yourself into the world of it…’ I don’t think there’s anything he couldn’t do.”
Macy’s stock was high after Boogie Nights and Fargo, but he was in danger of being typecast as the downcast, down-on-his-luck husband. He teamed up with Anderson and Seymour-Hoffman once more on the 1999 epic Tom Cruise drama Magnolia before spending the first part of the 2000s as a supporting actor on a range of films, including the surprise ageing biker hit Wild Hogs with Tim Allen, John Travolta and Ray Liotta.
Macy then led the multi-award-winning Shameless as the shambolic Frank Gallagher over a ten-year period from 2011, while most recently he’s been seen in the Edgar Wright remake of The Running Man and the Joel Edgerton Netflix hit Train Dreams, which is being tipped for awards season success when March comes around next year.
