Richard Gant is the one man on screen who is not fooled. Promoters, officers, judges, police chiefs: he gives small parts a big voice and a sceptical eye, and he is usually better than the scene around him.
Fi1m perspective
In Bean (1997), a whole Los Angeles household is taken in by Rowan Atkinson's clown, and one man is not. Richard Gant's Lieutenant Brutus, the security officer, distrusts Bean from the first handshake and never changes his mind, and he is the only American in the film who behaves sensibly. That is the Gant part in miniature. He walks in, looks at the situation, decides it does not add up, and the film carries on regardless. He has been doing some version of this for more than forty years, and he is good at it.
He came to the screen from the theatre, with his first film work in 1980, and spent that decade in supporting parts. The role people remember is George Washington Duke, the promoter in Rocky V (1990), a part Sylvester Stallone chose him for. After that came more of the same at a slightly higher grade: Bean, the Older Cop in The Big Lebowski (1998), Admiral Phelps in Godzilla (1998). Television has given him the longer runs, as Captain Richard Page in Special Unit 2 (2001–2002), Hostetler in Deadwood (2004–2006), Owen Thoreau Sr. in Men of a Certain Age (2009–2011) and, later, Ray Hayward in Mr. Iglesias (2019–2020). He is still working.
The trouble with his most famous part is the film around it. Rocky V is a poor film, and the script treats Duke as the villain of a children's serial, all loud suits and bluster. Gant plays it with such evident pleasure that we found ourselves looking forward to his scenes and were disappointed each time the film cut back to the mullet, which is not what Stallone and John G. Avildsen intended. He is a big man with a big voice, and when the writing gives him nothing to say, the voice still gives us something to listen to.
That is also the limit. He is cast as a type, the authority who is gruff or imposing or both, and the films have rarely asked him to be anything else. His size and his delivery get him through the door, and then the script decides how many scenes he is allowed. In Rocky V he is given relish and no reason; in Bean he is given the right instinct and a handful of scenes. Neither film is worth your evening for him alone, though he improves both.
If you want to see what he does with time, the television is where he has had it, and we have not reviewed enough of it to say more than that. On film, he remains the man who should have been listened to. The films seldom do.
Biography
Richard Gant is an American actor born on 10 March 1944 in San Francisco, California. He is known for his role as the boxing promoter George Washington Duke in the film Rocky V (1990).
Gant has appeared in numerous films and television series, including The Big Lebowski (1998), Godzilla (1998), Bean (1997), Deadwood (2004–2006) as Hostetler, Friends (1994), How I Met Your Mother (2005), Smallville (2001), Charmed (1998), Bones (2005), Norbit (2007) and Men of a Certain Age (2009–2012) as Owen. He trained at California State University, East Bay and Samuel Merritt University, served in the US Air Force, and worked in off-Broadway theatre before his screen career began in 1980.
