Art Evans spent five decades as the man at the edge of the frame, the private, the detective, the controller, and played each with a stillness most leads never manage. A Soldier's Story shows how much he could do with almost nothing.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Art Evans's eyes in A Soldier's Story (1984). His Private Wilkie has lost his stripes to Sergeant Waters and wants them back badly enough to agree with anyone who might return them. Evans plays that hunger mostly from the neck up, checking who is listening before he speaks and adjusting his face to suit them. It is the smallest performance in the film and the most exact. We came away thinking about him longer than about men with three times his lines, because he had shown us a whole career of small humiliations without once asking for our sympathy.
That kind of economy is learned, and Evans learned it on stage. He came up in the mid-1960s at Frank Silvera's Theater of Being in Los Angeles and starred in The Amen Corner, which went to Broadway in 1965. Film came later and slowly: uncredited bits in the early 1970s, then a first credited part in Leadbelly (1976) as Blind Lemon Jefferson, a role that drew on his own musical ability. Television guest spots kept him working in between. By the end he had over 120 credits across film and television, spread over five decades, and was still turning up in the 2020s.
The parts that came were mostly uniforms. He was a soldier, a policeman, a man with a badge or a headset, the person the plot needs to be competent and calm while somebody else has the crisis. In Christine (1983) he is an auto assembly worker, uncredited, and the car's first victim. In Fright Night (1985) he is Detective Lennox. In Die Hard 2 (1990) he is Leslie Barnes, the air-traffic controller who helps John McClane while the airport comes apart around them, in a film we enjoyed for its speed and its explosions and which never stops for long enough to notice him.
That is the pattern, and the frustration. Evans was dependable, and dependable actors get cast as the dependable man, which means the script rarely asks them for more than reassurance. Nobody seems ever to have written a bad word about him, and we suspect that is partly because nobody wrote him a part big enough to fail in. What he could do with a look is on record in one film; what he might have done with a lead we can only guess.
He said in 2015, "I am an actor and I'm always going to be an actor and I have fun," and it reads as a plain description rather than a boast. Start with A Soldier's Story, where the faces are close and the interviews go on long enough to watch the man who is trying too hard to be agreeable. Then, next time a film needs a controller or a sergeant, notice whether the actor in the job is doing anything at all. Evans always was.
Biography
Art Evans (1942–2024) was an American actor. Born Arthur James Evans on 27 March 1942 in Berkeley, California, he began his career at Frank Silvera’s Theater of Being in Los Angeles, taking a starring role in The Amen Corner, which transferred to Broadway in 1965.
His film roles included an uncredited part in Claudine (1974) and the character Wilkie in A Soldier’s Story (1984). He is best known for playing Leslie Barnes in Die Hard 2 (1990). Other credits include Christine (1983), Fright Night (1985) and Metro (1997), as well as television appearances in MASH (1972), The X-Files (1993) and Monk* (2002). Evans died in Los Angeles on 21 December 2024.
