Ryan Phillippe does his best work a yard behind someone else, watching and doing nothing. Cast for thirty years as police, soldiers and men with something on their conscience, he is dependable in a good ensemble and less certain out front.
Fi1m perspective
The traffic stop in Crash (2005) belongs to Matt Dillon, Thandiwe Newton and Terrence Howard, and the fourth person in it is Ryan Phillippe. His rookie, Tom Hansen, stands a yard back while his partner searches a woman in front of her husband, and he does nothing. He does not approve and he does not step in, and the film knows that is the worst thing in the scene. We found him the hardest of the four to watch, because most of us know which officer we would have been that night, and it is not Dillon. The rest of the film steers everyone in Los Angeles into everyone else so that a lesson can be taught; this is the stretch where nobody has to be told it.
He began on daytime television as Billy Douglas in One Life to Live (1992–1993), the first gay teenager on an American soap, and has said he was "so young that there were elements of me that were afraid because it was such a different time." Small parts in Crimson Tide (1995) and White Squall (1996) followed, then the two films that made him a teen star, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) as Barry Cox and Cruel Intentions (1999) as Sébastian Valmont. The 2000s were better company than that suggests: Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), Crash, Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (2006) as John "Doc" Bradley, The Lincoln Lawyer (2011). Read the list and a pattern comes up. He is cast as police, soldiers and men with something on their conscience, and nearly always as one of several.
That is where he is good. In an ensemble he does the unshowy work of listening, and he prepares: he does many of his own stunts and trains in weapons and tactics before the action parts, which is more than most leading men bother with. What he has less often had is a film built round him. Shooter (2016–2018) gave him three seasons as Bob Lee Swagger, and the years since the 2000s have also included a good deal of lower-profile work that nobody would put on a highlights reel.
Damages is the case in point on our own pages. He arrived as Channing McClaren for the last two seasons, by which time the show's trick of opening on a disaster and rewinding was one we could predict, and he never had Glenn Close's advantage of thirteen fresh hours. That is not his fault, and the series was not his to save either. Give him a uniform, a partner to stand beside and a wrong to watch, and he is exactly right. Whether anyone has yet written him the film in which he is the one who acts, rather than the one who fails to, we could not say; we have not seen it.
Biography
Matthew Ryan Phillippe is an American actor. He began his career with a role as Billy Douglas on the soap opera One Life to Live (1992–1993) and made his feature film debut in Crimson Tide (1995).
Phillippe came to prominence in the late 1990s with starring roles in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), 54 (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999). He later appeared in Gosford Park (2001), Crash (2004), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and The Lincoln Lawyer (2011).
On television, he played Channing McClaren in the fifth season of Damages (2012) and starred as Bob Lee Swagger in Shooter (2016–2018).
