A face built for the second row: wide eyes, a slow chuckle that promised trouble, and a rustic ease that let him play Eastwood's dim companion one year and a killer the next. Reliable, likeable, and rarely the reason to see a film.
Fi1m perspective
Watch for the eyes. Geoffrey Lewis had a stare that opened a fraction too wide, as if the man opposite had just said something he did not believe, and a chuckle that arrived a beat late and lower than expected. In a western those two things made him somebody you did not want standing behind you. In a comedy they made him the friend who has had one more beer than he will admit to. He used the same instruments for more than thirty years and nobody seems to have minded.
The career has a plain shape. Small parts in 1972, in The Culpepper Cattle Co. and Bad Company, and then in 1973 the outlaw Stacey Bridges in High Plains Drifter, with Clint Eastwood directing. That was the start of seven films with Eastwood over the next twenty-four years, and it is the reason most people know the face. The same year he was Harry Pierpont in Dillinger. By 1974 he was Eddie Goody in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and by 1978 he was Orville Boggs, the friend in Every Which Way but Loose, a part he played again in Any Which Way You Can (1980). After that the work never stopped, more than 200 productions in features and television, down to Abner Mercer in The Way of the Gun (2000), alongside his daughter Juliette Lewis, and Roy Sullivan in Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects (2005).
What he did well was fit. Eastwood's films needed a man who could be menacing without competing for the frame and funny without asking for the laugh, and Lewis could do both, sometimes in the same picture. The villain parts are the ones that stay with us. The sidekick parts are warmer and thinner, and they depended on what the film gave him.
We will be honest about Any Which Way You Can. We scored it 50, our review found room for Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Ruth Gordon and the orangutan, and it did not find room for Lewis. Watching it again for this piece, we would not change that: he is amiable, he is there, and Clyde has the better material. That is not a complaint about the actor. It is the fate of the loyal friend in a film where the star is coasting.
He said once that the director and the other actors were about two inches of something a yard long, and the other thirty-four were his to do himself. It is a fair description of a career spent making small parts carry their own weight. If you want him at his best, go to the westerns and the crime films, where the stare had something to look at.
Biography
Geoffrey Lewis (31 July 1935 – 7 April 2015) was an American character actor. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, he studied theatre arts at San Bernardino Valley College and the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, and performed off-Broadway and in regional theatre before entering film and television in the early 1970s.
He appeared in more than 200 films and television productions. His film credits include High Plains Drifter (1973), Heaven's Gate (1980) as Trapper Fred, and multiple collaborations with Clint Eastwood. On television he had recurring or guest roles in series including The A-Team (1983), The X-Files (1993) and My Name Is Earl (2005), and received a Golden Globe nomination for the sitcom Flo (1980–81). He was the father of actress Juliette Lewis.
