Lee Arenberg is the man the camera cuts to when the joke needs a witness. In make-up, in dialect, as pirate or alien, he reacts better than most actors act, and he has spent a long career on the edge of the frame doing it.
Fi1m perspective
The joke is usually happening somewhere else. In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) a mill wheel comes off its axle with two swordsmen still inside it, and the editors cut away, at the exact moments the gag needs them, to Pintel and Ragetti watching it roll. Lee Arenberg's job in that scene is to be the audience, and he does it so well that the fight is funnier for having him in it. We laughed out loud twice, and both times the laugh needed his face to finish it.
That is the shape of the career. He began in theatre in the mid-1980s with the Actors' Gang, and the film and television work that followed from 1987 was guest parts: Star Trek more than once, and a turn on Seinfeld (1992) as Mike Moffitt, the man who steals a parking space. Then Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) put Pintel in front of a great many people, and he played him again in Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), always alongside Mackenzie Crook's Ragetti, always for Gore Verbinski. From 2011 to 2018 he was Grumpy, also called Leroy, in Once Upon a Time, a part that ran for more than fifty episodes and gave him a second character strangers recognise.
What he does is disappear under prosthetics and an accent and come out the other side as an oddball, an alien or a small menace. The double act with Crook is the best place to see it: two idiots at the rail, one tall and one not, neither of them the straight man. Our review of the first film did not single him out, and that is fair. It is an ensemble, the film is the better of the two, and his contribution to it is a face you notice in the crowd rather than a scene you would describe to a friend on the way home.
The criticism is obvious and true. He has spent decades as the eccentric at the side of the picture and almost never the person in the middle of it, and the parts have been comic relief far more often than not. His own account of method is unfussy: "I'm a 'whatever school works' actor." It shows, in the good sense. He gets on with it.
Nobody has yet tried giving him the mill wheel rather than the view of it. We would watch.
Biography
Lee Arenberg is an American actor. He played the pirate Pintel in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). He also had a recurring role as Leroy/Grumpy in the television series Once Upon a Time (2011).
Arenberg attended Santa Monica High School and studied theatre at UCLA. He was a co-founder of the Actors' Gang theatre company in Los Angeles. His other film credits include Waterworld (1995) and RoboCop 3 (1993). Television appearances include episodes of Seinfeld (1992), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Friends (1994).
