David Knell

In Pig (2021), Nicolas Cage sits across a white tablecloth from a chef called Finway and asks him what he wanted to cook when he was young. Finway's menu describes the scallops as deconstructed. David Knell plays him, and for a couple of minutes he does almost nothing that would read as acting: the smile goes, the eyes fill, and a man remembers that he once wanted to open a pub. Michael Sarnoski holds the two of them in a plain shot and lets it sit. It moved us more than we thought a scene about scallops could, and the reason is Knell, who lets the confidence leave his face one degree at a time rather than all at once.

That scene arrived more than forty years into a career most viewers would not have known they were following. Knell began on stage as a teenager, in the ensemble of the original Broadway production of Liz Swados's Runaways (1978), and spent the 1980s as the awkward or hapless young man in other people's films: Nelson in Spring Break (1983), Claude, one of the Moron Twins, in Splash (1984), Ernie in Turner & Hooch (1989) and Ernie again, the Rekall technician, in Total Recall (1990). The parts were small and the type was fixed. He was the one who fumbled the thing while the star got on with the plot.

Then three decades of television, guest spots on ALF, Murder, She Wrote, Leverage and Grimm, and work behind the camera as an editor, camera operator and assistant director. None of that is a story, which is why Pig is one. Knell has said a character actor's ideal is someone reading a script and thinking "That's the David Knell part", and Finway is the callow boy of the 1980s comedies grown into a man with a tasting menu and a reputation to protect. The nervous, evasive talk he was hired for at twenty-two is what the scene runs on; the difference is that this film takes the nervousness seriously.

We have one performance to go on, and one performance is not a body of work. What it shows is an actor who understands that a supporting part is judged by what it gives the lead to react to, and who gave Cage the best scene in the film by not competing with him for it. He has since appeared in To Kill a Wolf (2024), which we have not reviewed. If a director with a quiet script needs a man who can be caught out at a table, the number is there to be called.