M.C. Gainey has spent four decades being the large, moustached man the hero should not have crossed. He does it without vanity and without much variation, and the one time a director laughed at the type rather than leaning on it, in Sideways, it produced his best work.
Fi1m perspective
The moustache arrives first. Then the height, then the voice, gravel poured over something slow and Southern, and by the time M.C. Gainey has finished a line you know who he is: the convict, the biker, the deputy who will not be reading anyone their rights. He has never been the star of anything and has never looked as though he wanted to be. He walks into a scene as the reason someone else checks over their shoulder, does the job, and is gone.
The career has one shape and he knows it. Uncredited extra work on Hard Times (1975), a screen debut in Pennies from Heaven (1981), then more than fifty films and dozens of television guest parts, nearly all of them the same large man in a different hat. Con Air (1997) gave him Swamp Thing, an inmate on a plane full of inmates. The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) gave him Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. Quentin Tarantino gave him Big John Brittle in Django Unchained (2012). Television gave him the longest run, nineteen episodes as Tom Friendly on Lost (2005–2008), where a face that means trouble was worth having around. He has put it more plainly than we could: "Bikers, cowboys and convicts are my spe-ci-ality."
Of the two films we have reviewed, one uses him and one merely hires him. In Tangled (2010) he voices the Captain of the Guard and, as we said at the time, the part is a moustache; the animators drew the type and he supplied the growl. Sideways (2004) is another matter. Alexander Payne casts him as Cammi's husband, the cuckold in a wine-country comedy of small humiliations, and gives him a scene that involves no clothes whatever. We laughed harder than at anything else in the film and then felt slightly mean about it, because Gainey does not play it for the laugh. He plays a man too furious to notice he is naked, and that is exactly why it is funny. It is the one time a director has looked at the shape of him and found the person inside it.
The limit is the obvious one. He has said that his face rules out lawyers and priests, and the business has agreed with him since the 1980s. That is not a fault, and it is not quite a criticism, but it means the work is dependable rather than surprising. Directors who want a heavy get a good one. Directors who want anything else have rarely asked. If someone finally casts him as a priest, we would like to be told.
Biography
M. C. Gainey (born Michael Connor Gainey) is an American character actor. He was born on 18 January 1948 in Jackson, Mississippi. He attended the University of Southern Mississippi and the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in the early 1970s. Prior to acting, he worked as a mortician's apprentice and served in the US Army.
Gainey made his feature film debut in Pennies from Heaven (1981). He has appeared in numerous films including Con Air (1997), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Sideways (2004), in which he played Cammi's Husband. On television he is known for the recurring role of Tom Friendly in Lost (2005–2008) and guest appearances in series such as The X-Files, Criminal Minds and The Mentalist. He has been married to Kim Novicki since 2002.
