A timid man with an accent from nowhere, saying absurd things with total conviction: Peter MacNicol has been doing this in other people's films since the 1980s, and he is nearly always the part worth waiting for.
Fi1m perspective
Janosz Poha, the museum curator in Ghostbusters II (1989), speaks with an accent that belongs to no country on any map. That was MacNicol's own doing; he has said of the part, "I decided maybe I should be Carpathian, and I adopted this impossible accent that I came up with." Once the painting has him, Janosz delivers its orders in the tone of a waiter reading out the specials, and MacNicol never once looks at the audience to check we have got it. We laughed at nearly every line he has, several of which are not jokes, and in a sequel that otherwise does nothing new he is the one thing that is. It is the clearest example of what he does: a mild man, entirely serious, saying something ridiculous.
He did not start out as the funny man at the edge of the frame. He came from the stage, two seasons at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis at the end of the 1970s and then Broadway in Crimes of the Heart in 1981, and his first film parts were leads: Dragonslayer (1981) and, a year later, Stingo in Sophie's Choice, opposite Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. We have not reviewed either and will not judge them here. What we can say is that after them the leads stopped and the character parts began, and the character parts are where his reputation lives.
Addams Family Values (1993) shows the other side of the trick. Gary Granger runs Camp Chippewa with Christine Baranski's Becky Martin-Granger, a place Ken Adam builds out of blond wood and bunting where every child wears a polo shirt, and MacNicol plays him as a man who believes in all of it. He is the cheerful authority Wednesday Addams has been sent to endure, and the joke needs him sincere rather than sinister; he is. It is the better film of the two we have reviewed, and the camp half is close to perfect, but Christina Ricci's stillness gets the biggest laughs and MacNicol is there to serve it. That is the shape of most of his screen work: the best thing in a scene that belongs to somebody else.
Television gave him the longer run. John Cage in Ally McBeal (1997 to 2002), for David E. Kelley, with whom he has worked three times, let the mild eccentric grow across seasons rather than scenes, and he has stayed on the small screen since, in Numb3rs (2005 to 2010), 24 (2007) and Veep (2016 to 2019), alongside a good deal of voice work.
The criticism, and it is fair, is that a career of supporting parts is a career of other people's films. He has not carried one since 1982, and we do not know whether anyone asked. The films are not worse for it, and several are better for him. If you have one evening, Addams Family Values is the better film and Ghostbusters II is the better MacNicol, and in both you will spend some of the running time waiting for him to come back.
Biography
Peter MacNicol is an American actor born on 10 April 1954 in Dallas, Texas. He trained at the University of Dallas and the University of Minnesota, and performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis before moving to New York.
He made his Broadway debut in the 1981 production of Crimes of the Heart, for which he received a Theatre World Award. His film roles include Galen in Dragonslayer (1981), Stingo in Sophie's Choice (1982), Janosz Poha in Ghostbusters II (1989), Gary Granger in Addams Family Values (1993), and David Langley in Bean (1997).
On television, MacNicol is known for playing John Cage in Ally McBeal (1997–2002), for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 2001. He has also appeared in series including Chicago Hope, Numb3rs, 24, Grey's Anatomy and Veep.
