Kim Coates spent the best part of two decades as the heavy in other people's action films before Sons of Anarchy gave him a part where the menace and the jokes belong to the same man. Tig Trager is the work to see.
Fi1m perspective
The club in Sons of Anarchy (2008) is drawn with care: a sensible one, a Glaswegian who fights like it, a president doing arithmetic on his own hands. Kim Coates's Tig Trager is the odd one, and his oddities get most of the laughs. What makes the part work is that Coates does not soften the man to earn them. Tig is plainly fit for the club's worst errands, and the same face that gets the laugh is the one you would not want turning up at your door. We laughed at him more than at anyone else in Charming and were slightly uneasy about doing so, which we suspect is the response Coates was after.
He came to it the long way. The stage came first, in Canadian theatre in the mid-1980s, where he became the youngest actor to play Macbeth at the Stratford Festival and went on to play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway. Hollywood then spent years using very little of that. The Last Boy Scout (1991), as Chet, opened the door, and through the 1990s and 2000s he was the tough or the henchman in Waterworld (1995), Black Hawk Down (2001), as Wex, and Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). He is also in Battlefield Earth (2000), as Carlo, a film we found noisy and mostly dull, and in which nobody stands out, him included.
So it is worth knowing that he nearly did not take Tig. Of Kurt Sutter's first script he has said: "I read one script, the first one, and I said, 'You know Kurt, I have no interest in playing a sociopath. I just don't and I won't.'" That reluctance is in the performance. Coates keeps a stubborn thread of humanity and humour running through a violent man, and it is why Tig is a character rather than a threat with a name. The series itself does not hold up its end: we thought the first three seasons good crime drama and the last four a restaging of the same betrayal, and Katey Sagal and Ron Perlman are the reasons to watch. Coates is part of what makes the room around them worth sitting in.
Whether the seven years in Charming widened his options is harder to say from where we sit. Goon (2011), as Ronnie Hortense, is a comedy and not a villain's part, and Bad Blood (2017) made him the lead, as Declan Gardiner, on television; we have not reviewed either, so we will only note that they exist and that both are a step away from the henchman. He has kept working into the 2020s, leading series and supporting films, and the typecasting that followed him from Waterworld has not gone away.
The heavies will keep arriving. The part to hope for is the one that remembers Tig: a frightening man who is also, without apology, funny.
Biography
Kim Coates is a Canadian and American actor. Born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, he attended the University of Saskatchewan, where he first encountered theatre and enrolled in a drama course.
Coates has appeared in numerous films and television series, including Battlefield Earth (2000) as Carlo, Black Hawk Down (2001) as Wex, Pearl Harbor (2001), Waterworld (1995) and Bad Boys (1995). He is known for his role as Alex 'Tig' Trager in the FX series Sons of Anarchy (2008–14) and as Declan Gardiner in Bad Blood (2017–18). He has also performed on stage, including in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and Macbeth at the Stratford Theatre.
