William Mapother plays men who think they are owed something, and plays them straight, as if they were right. In In the Bedroom that is far more frightening than open menace would be; since then the parts have rarely asked him for as much.
Fi1m perspective
Richard Strout keeps turning up. In In the Bedroom (2001) he is the husband Natalie has left but not divorced, his family owns the fish plant, and every time he appears the film gets quieter. Mapother plays him as a man who honestly believes he is the injured party, and nothing in his voice or his posture tells you he is dangerous. We found we were dreading each of his arrivals more than anything the film shows in its first hour, and it took us a while to work out why. He never once signals that he knows he is the problem.
He had been about for a while before that. Small film parts from 1989, then a spell away from acting, then a return in the late 1990s, including Wallis in Mission: Impossible II (2000), a part so slight that our review does not mention him. Todd Field's first film changed that. It gave Mapother one job, to be the threat in a film that refuses to treat him as a set piece, and he did it well enough that the industry noticed what kind of actor he was. It then cast him as that kind of actor for the next two decades.
Mostly that has meant menace in thrillers and horror: Matthew Williams in The Grudge (2004), and above all Ethan Rom in Lost (2004–2010), the enigmatic antagonist he played across eleven episodes and the reason most people know his face without knowing his name. The exception is Another Earth (2011), where he took the lead as John Burroughs opposite Brit Marling, a part he has said he had never read anything like. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but it is the one film on his list where the script wanted the grief before the threat.
What he does well is hold two things at once: a man capable of violence and a man convinced of his own decency. That is the whole of Strout, and it is why the character alarms us more than a villain would. The weakness is not his but the casting's. Directors have kept asking for the first half, the creepy stranger, and leaving the second on the table. He knows it; he has said he is "very conscious about moving away from those", meaning the frightening parts, and the record suggests the offers have not always cooperated.
See In the Bedroom, and watch him in the scenes where he is doing nothing more than standing in a doorway. Then wait for someone to give him a part that trusts him to be wronged rather than merely wrong.
Biography
William Mapother is an American actor. He was born William Reibert Mapother Jr. on 17 April 1965 in Louisville, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a B.A. in English. Before pursuing acting full-time, he worked as a teacher in Los Angeles.
Mapother is known for his role as Ethan Rom in the television series Lost (2004–2010) and for his performance as Richard Strout in the film In the Bedroom (2001). He appeared as Wallis in Mission: Impossible II (2000) and had roles in Minority Report (2002) and Another Earth (2011). He received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for the ensemble cast of In the Bedroom.
He is a first cousin of actor Tom Cruise.
