John Diehl has spent more than forty years playing the man in the second row who is not as steady as he looks. Television made him recognisable and he walked away from it; the parts he rates, and critics rate, are the ones fewer people saw.
Fi1m perspective
In Jurassic Park III (2001) John Diehl is Cooper, one of three mercenaries flown onto the island, and the film gives him about as much as it gives the other two: a gun, a jumpsuit and a place in the queue. We found ourselves putting money on the order they would go in, and Cooper did nothing to upset the odds. That is not Diehl's fault. It is the part he is most often handed, the hired man in the second row, and the interest of his career is how hard he has worked to avoid it.
He began in bit parts in Escape from New York (1981) and Stripes (1981), where as Cruiser he was one of the recruits improvising around John Candy, and improvisation and physical comedy have stayed in the kit. Then came Detective Larry Zito in Miami Vice (1984), which made him recognisable and, by his own account, restless. "I was so bored with being in Miami 9 months out of the year and not doing much as “Zito”," he said later, and he left the series before it left the air to do theatre and independent films. We rate the early seasons of Miami Vice highly, for the music and the sadness under the pastels; Zito was the comic relief, and our review of the series does not mention him, which tells you how the part was written.
What followed is the career of a character actor who declined to be one thing. Kawalsky in Stargate (1994), G. Gordon Liddy in Nixon (1995), a recurring run in The Shield (2002 to 2005), and a great deal of stage work, including several Sam Shepard productions. The parts that stick are the edgy ones, men whose rank or manner promises steadiness and whose behaviour does not deliver it. The best account of what he can do, by his own reckoning and by most critics', is Paul in Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty (2004), a lead role in which he plays a deluded man and lets you see the intelligence still working underneath. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is the film he calls his favourite, and the one people who admire him point to first.
That is the caveat. The two titles of his we have written about use him as a running joke and as a body count, and if you meet him only there you will wonder what the fuss is. Look instead for the small films and the stage, where the man in the second row turns out to have been the interesting one.
Biography
John Diehl is an American character actor born on 1 May 1950 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began his career in avant-garde theatre after moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, becoming an acting member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and working with playwrights including Sam Shepard.
Diehl's early film roles included parts in Escape from New York (1981), Stripes (1981) and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983). He gained wider recognition as Detective Larry Zito on the television series Miami Vice from 1984 to 1987, leaving after his character was killed off. Subsequent credits include Stargate (1994), Nixon (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), Jurassic Park III (2001) and recurring appearances on The Shield.
Diehl has continued to work in film and television while maintaining a stage career. He has been married to singer Julie Christensen since 1992.
