David James Elliott is the actor we would cast when a part needs to look trustworthy in a uniform, and for ten years on JAG that was enough. On film he has mostly been asked for the bearing and not the man.
Fi1m perspective
In Trumbo (2015), David James Elliott plays John Wayne, and the first thing we noticed is that the shoulders are right. The bearing is right too. Jay Roach's film asks for nothing further; what we got, we said at the time, was a sketch with good shoulders. It is a fair summary of how the cinema has used him. He looks like a man institutions trust, and the films have been content to stop at the look.
Television gave him room to do more with it. He played Harmon Rabb Jr, a naval aviator turned military lawyer, across 227 episodes of Donald P. Bellisario's JAG between 1995 and 2005, and the part fixed him in the public mind as the principled professional in uniform: measured, low-key, confident. Two years with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival Young Company sit behind that steadiness. He directed three episodes himself. When the programme ended, the industry asked for the same man in smaller doses: guest and recurring parts in Mad Men (2014), Spinning Out (2020), Heels and The Chicken Sisters, and a three-episode return as Rabb in NCIS: Los Angeles (2019) opposite Catherine Bell. The one reservation anyone raises is that he keeps being put in uniform.
That is also our complaint about Trumbo. We felt something close to frustration watching it: here was an actor built to play Wayne, with a decade of practice at carrying a uniform convincingly, put into a film about the worst thing Hollywood ever did to its own, and given a silhouette. Helen Mirren and Michael Stuhlbarg were handed scenes with a cost in them. Elliott was handed a stance. He does not fumble it. Nobody has yet asked him, on film, to do anything he could fumble.
Whether that is a limit of the actor or of the offers, we cannot say from one supporting part and a programme we have not reviewed. He has said that on JAG he worked hard not to play a two-dimensional character. The films have not yet asked him to try.
Biography
David James Elliott is a Canadian actor. Born David William Smith on 21 September 1960 in Milton, Ontario, he adopted his professional name after moving to Los Angeles. He is best known for playing naval aviator and lawyer Harmon Rabb Jr. in the television series JAG from 1995 to 2005.
Elliott has appeared in numerous television series and films. His credits include roles in Police Academy 3: Back in Training (1986), Seinfeld (1989), Mad Men (2007), Scorpion (2014) and NCIS: Los Angeles (2009), where he reprised the role of Harmon Rabb Jr. In 2015 he played John Wayne in the film Trumbo.
