Martin Donovan does less than almost anyone else in the frame and makes us watch him for it. Thirty years of quiet, exact supporting work, best seen in Hal Hartley's films, where the stillness was the point rather than a pause before somebody louder.
Fi1m perspective
In The Apprentice (2024), Martin Donovan's Fred Trump gives his son a hard stare and a lecture and nothing else, and the film needs nothing else from him. It is the reason the Roy Cohn scenes work: a boy who has been looked at like that will follow the first man who says yes. Donovan has been doing this for a long time. He stands still, says the line flatly and lets the other actor do the reacting. In the wrong film it reads as absence. In the right one it reads as a man thinking, and we lean in to find out what about.
The right films, for most of the 1990s, were Hal Hartley's. From Trust (1990), where he played Matthew Slaughter, through The Book of Life (1998), Donovan made six films with Hartley, whose actors move as if choreographed and are asked for economy rather than naturalism. Donovan has called it "ballet instead of modern jazz", and it suited him: the formality gave his stillness a shape, so that the smallest shift of weight counted. Then Jane Campion cast him as Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and a wider audience noticed what the art houses already had, an intelligence that let you see the hurt underneath without anyone pointing at it.
Since then he has been the man in the third scene of a great many bigger pictures. Christopher Nolan used him twice, in Insomnia (2002) as Hap Eckhart and in Tenet (2020) as Fay, and there has been television: Weeds, Homeland, Big Little Lies. He wrote and directed his own film, Collaborator, in 2011. The bigger the picture, the less it tends to ask of him. In Tenet he is one more person in a good coat delivering instructions; we did not single him out in our review, and the film did not either.
The Apprentice is the exception, and it is where we felt him most. What chilled us was how little the film had to explain. Donovan never raises his voice, and one stare from him told us more about why Sebastian Stan's young Donald would take Roy Cohn for a second father than any of Cohn's speeches did. The film itself runs out of road once the lessons are learnt, but that is not Donovan's doing.
Critics have noted, sometimes as a complaint, that he has had few leading parts in major studio films. We are not sure complaint is the right register. An actor who does this little on purpose needs a director who has built the film around it, and outside Hartley very few have tried. Go back to Trust if you want to see what he looks like when someone does.
Biography
Martin Donovan is an American actor. Born in Reseda, California, he began his career as a stage actor and made his screen debut in the 1984 independent film Hard Choices. He gained prominence through a long collaboration with director Hal Hartley, appearing in films including Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992), Amateur (1994) and The Book of Life (1998).
Donovan is known for his role as DEA agent Peter Scottson in the series Weeds. He made his writing and directorial debut with the 2011 film Collaborator. His credits also include Detective Hap Eckhart in Insomnia (2002), Mitchell Carson in Ant-Man (2015), Fay in Tenet (2020) and Fred Trump in The Apprentice (2024).
