Miguel Ferrer

In Traffic (2000), Miguel Ferrer’s Eduardo Ruiz explains the drug trade as though being right has become a tedious obligation. It is a long, contemptuous speech from a witness, and Ferrer delivers it without the satisfaction we might expect from a man correcting everyone else. We laughed at his weariness: he sounds bored by an explanation the people listening still need to hear. That is where we rate him most highly, making a supporting part precise without asking the film to stop for him.

That gift had already found a useful home in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), his breakthrough as Bob Morton, the ambitious OCP executive who creates the cyborg policeman. Ferrer’s cockiness fits a film savage about corporate power: the executive’s self-assurance gives us something specific to dislike. His job is to make that ambition recognisable, and he does not need to make Morton sympathetic to do it. We rate the film highly, but its success does not rest on Ferrer; Peter Weller makes us care about the person inside the metal.

The career that followed was built largely from supporting film parts and recurring television roles, with fewer chances to lead. Albert Rosenfield, the abrasive FBI forensics expert in Twin Peaks (1990–91), gave his sharpness another setting in which expertise and bad manners could coexist. The distinctive voice also took him into animation, including Shan-Yu, the antagonist in Mulan (1998).

The risk in that casting is plain: if abrasiveness becomes the whole part, there is little left to learn about the man. In Traffic, the boredom matters as much as the contempt, because Ruiz sounds as though he has given this explanation too often. Soderbergh’s film stalls for speeches in its Washington strand; Ferrer makes information about the trade sound like a personal grievance. Start with RoboCop, but take the warning about its violence seriously.