A ballet dancer who became the tall, silent man in other people's action films. In The Living Daylights he made a killer out of a milkman's coat and a length of headphone flex, and nothing he has been given since has asked as much of him.
Fi1m perspective
A milkman arrives at a country safe house with a crate of bottles. Nothing about him is wrong except that he is too tall and too calm. Then the bottles explode and he takes a man by the throat with the flex of his headphones. We jumped, properly, and we had not done that at a Bond film since we were children. Andreas Wisniewski barely speaks in The Living Daylights (1987) and he is the best villain in it.
He came to acting from the stage, not the drama school. He was a classical dancer with the Bayerische Staatsoper before he turned to film in his mid-twenties, and his screen debut was Fletcher in Ken Russell's Gothic (1986). Necros followed a year later and led straight to Tony in Die Hard (1988). After that came supporting parts in American films and television, a non-speaking henchman in Mission: Impossible (1996), German productions, and a silent return in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). Three of the era's action films, and in each of them he is standing just behind the man who does the talking.
The dancing shows. Wisniewski moves like someone who knows exactly where his weight is, and in The Living Daylights that turns the safe house attack into something closer to choreography than brawling. He also changes accent and clothes without fuss: the milkman first, then somebody else, then somebody else again, each one plausible for the thirty seconds it needs to be. Alec Mills shoots the film in wet greys and stuffy gold, and Peter Davies and John Grover cut it with no slack, and Necros suits that. He is a job of work, done well and quickly.
That is also the limit. The parts are brief and largely silent, and none of them gives him a scene in which the henchman has to want something. In Mission: Impossible he is credited as Max's companion, which tells you how much the script had in mind for him. Necros works because the film around him is tight and takes him seriously; the character himself is a coat, a walk and a pair of headphones. Asked in 2017 whether he feared being typecast, he said: "Afraid of being typecasted at my age? I’d be quite happy to play another twenty villains."
Watch The Living Daylights for its first hour and stay for the safe house. If you spot a tall man at the edge of an action film saying nothing and looking as though he could take the whole cast apart, it may well be him, and it is a small pity that so few directors thought to find out what he would do with a line.
Biography
Andreas Wisniewski is a German actor and former dancer. He trained in dance in West Berlin, London, Copenhagen and Paris before working as a ballet dancer in West Berlin and Munich, later turning to acting.
Wisniewski made his screen debut as Fletcher in Gothic (1986). He is known for his roles as Necros in The Living Daylights (1987), Tony in Die Hard (1988), Max's companion in Mission: Impossible (1996) and the same character in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). Other credits include Death Machine (1995), Centurion (2010) and The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior (2008). He has also appeared in television series such as Northern Exposure (1990) and directed the short film Willows (2001). He has worked in both international and German productions.
