A Memphis character actor with a slow drawl and a face built for suspicion, Sanderson spent four decades playing oddballs, hicks and lowlifes, and in Blade Runner he made one of them the loneliest man on screen. Typecast, certainly; wasted, rarely.
Fi1m perspective
Sanderson's men look at strangers as if they expect to be hit, and speak slowly enough to be misunderstood twice. It is a small instrument and he never pretended otherwise. But in Blade Runner (1982) it is exactly the right one: J.F. Sebastian, the lonely genetic designer, is a man who has not had a conversation in some time and is trying to remember how one goes. Our own review recommends Ridley Scott's film for its city, for Vangelis's music and for Rutger Hauer, and we stand by that. But Sebastian is the part of it that left us sad, and the reason is how little Sanderson does with him. He does not ask for pity. He is simply glad of company, and lets us work out what that gladness will cost.
He had come up the hard way, off-Broadway in New York and then independent and exploitation films from the mid-1970s, before Michael Apted gave him Lee Dollarhide in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), a film we rate highly and which does not lean on him. Blade Runner followed two years later, and in the same year he began eight seasons as Larry on Newhart (1982–1990), the part that made him recognisable to people who had never heard of Sebastian. The deadpan there is the same deadpan as in the Scott film, pointed at a laugh instead of a loss.
The later work was mostly on television, and it was the best of it. In Deadwood (2004–2006, returning in 2019) he is E.B. Farnum, the scheming hotelier and mayor, a man who is always plotting and never quite in the room where the real plotting happens. In True Blood (2008–2012) he is Bud Dearborne, the small-town sheriff, and the drawl that once marked him as backwoods scum now marks him as the only reasonable adult in the county.
The criticism is fair and he made it himself: the eccentrics, the renegades, the prairie scum, the same face and the same accent doing the same job for forty years. Of his memoir he said, "I thought maybe the book should be called 'A Tale Told by an Idiot,' because I did play a lot of idiot parts." What the criticism misses is that almost none of them are stupid on screen. Sebastian is a genius. Farnum is a coward, not a fool. Sanderson's gift was to take a part written as a type and give it a private life the script had not asked for.
He published the autobiography in 2019 and stopped acting around 2020. Nobody will build a retrospective around him, and nobody should. But the next time Blade Runner is on, watch the scene in which Sebastian opens his door. Everything he could do is in it.
Biography
William Sanderson (also credited as Bill Sanderson) is an American actor. He was born on 10 January 1944 in Memphis, Tennessee. He played J.F. Sebastian in the film Blade Runner (1982).
Sanderson trained in New York after earning BBA and JD degrees from Memphis State University and serving in the US Army. He began his career in off-Broadway productions. He is known for regular television roles as Larry on Newhart (1982–1990), E.B. Farnum on Deadwood (2004–2006, 2019) and Sheriff Bud Dearborne on True Blood (2008–2010, 2012). He has also appeared in Lost, The X-Files, Bones and voiced characters in Batman: The Animated Series.
