Saul Rubinek brings nervous intensity to writers, lawyers and producers, making professional status look less reassuring than it ought to. We rate him highly, with one reservation: familiar casting can leave too little room for anything beyond the fuss.
Fi1m perspective
In Unforgiven (1992), Saul Rubinek's W.W. Beauchamp writes about the West and helps to turn its violent men into legends. We found him unsettling because the apparently respectable business of recording events also helps to make violence attractive. Clint Eastwood gives this supporting character a job that matters to the film's questions about gunfighters and their reputations. Rubinek's nervous energy is useful here: it makes the writer more than a convenient way to explain things. Our reservation about the film's own attraction to gunfighter legend makes Beauchamp worth watching particularly closely.
His move from Canadian theatre, radio and television into American films in the 1980s established him as a character actor. Oliver Stone cast him as lawyer Harry Salt in Wall Street (1987). Writers, lawyers and producers recur in his work, and we can see the appeal of casting someone who makes such professions feel faintly suspect. The risk is that the job description starts doing too much of the acting.
In Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), he plays Lee Donowitz, a cocaine-using film producer. Rubinek is well suited to a character whose professional standing offers no guarantee of decent behaviour. His intensity makes the exaggeration funny, though the disreputable professional is familiar territory for him. We recommend the film for the lovers and the supporting cast, and he earns his place in the latter. The warning about its cruelty still stands; enjoying Rubinek does not require pretending the whole film is harmless.
His first feature as director, Jerry and Tom (1998), and his starring role in Warehouse 13 (2009–2014) took him beyond those supporting assignments. The Frenchman in the Coen brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) brought him back to an ensemble Western. We would still start with the two films that give his writers and producers such different uses. Choose Unforgiven first; save True Romance for an evening when tenderness mixed with cruelty sounds bearable.
Biography
Saul Rubinek is a Canadian actor, director, producer and playwright. Born on 2 July 1948 in Föhrenwald, a displaced-persons camp in Germany, to Polish Jewish parents who had been hidden during the Second World War, he moved with his family to Canada shortly after his birth.
He began his career in theatre, appearing in productions with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and co-founding Theatre Passe Muraille. Film roles include W.W. Beauchamp in Unforgiven (1992) and Lee Donowitz in True Romance (1993). He has also appeared in television series including Frasier, Warehouse 13 and Lost.
Rubinek directed the feature Jerry and Tom (1998), nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. He is married to producer Elinor Reid.
