During the waning months of 2023, I decided to take on the biggest challenge of my film-watching life: I would view the entire filmography of actor David Strathairn in chronological order. I hit snags along the way—as a Brit, a good few of his movies were unavailable to me—but I finished the project this past weekend, having seen 92 films. Whew.
You may not know his name, but you’d recognize his face. Though he’s spent a large part of his long career in smaller, independent features, he’s also made notable appearances in two Godzilla movies; the Bourne franchise; recent much-discussed productions like Nomadland, Nightmare Alley and Where the Crawdads Sing; and ‘90s classics The Firm, L.A. Confidential, A League of Their Own, Sneakers and The River Wild. A perennial supporting actor, once in a while he’ll take a leading role—the most prestigious example being Good Night, and Good Luck, which netted him his only Oscar nomination to date.
So what is it about David Strathairn that fascinates me so? Whereas many character actors are known for their eccentricities or unusual physicality, the strength of Strathairn’s screen presence lies in his interiority; Roger Ebert called him “that actor of precise inward silence.” Strathairn has extraordinarily eloquent eyes; he’s capable of making even the act of thinking not only visible, but interesting. And he’s been doing it for over 40 years! So, as his 75th birthday approached, I wanted to immerse myself in the career of the man who’s stealthily become one of modern cinema’s most stalwart assets—to explore what makes him so very good.
In Good Night and Good Luck, although Strathairn’s Ed Murrow speaks frequently and authoritatively on TV, behind the scenes he’s usually the quietest of the large and starry ensemble—the center of gravity in every room even when he’s not saying a word. That quiet power has a tangible presence.
When, as is more often the case, David Strathairn is in a supporting role, he transmits his opinion readily without dialogue. Much of Lincoln revolves around Daniel Day-Lewis channeling the 16th president’s legendary way with words; as his Secretary of State and right-hand man William Seward, Strathairn is afforded considerably less dialogue. Yet, purely from the way his Seward watches Lincoln when he’s in his full glorious flow, we can feel the complex dimensions of their relationship; the regard he has for Lincoln as a man, alongside his intense skepticism of his methods. All that frustration and admiration and concern conveyed simultaneously, with a mere look from Strathairn.
In the Gloaming sees him play the father of a gay son (Robert Sean Leonard) who has come home with a terminal AIDS diagnosis. While the majority of the film is dedicated to the relationship between son and mother (the indomitable Glenn Close), Strathairn’s father is a constant presence. He hovers around and blathers blithe pleasantries, all while his eyes belie the desperation of a man eager to connect with a child he doesn’t really know, but who has no idea how to do so. Once it’s too late, and he is left alone with the wife from whom he’s been long emotionally estranged, Strathairn ends the movie with the single most devastating line reading of his career so far—if you can watch him speak it without dissolving into tears, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.
In Limbo, his final collaboration with renowned indie director John Sayles, it’s the history of his character he keeps wrapped up within that soulful gaze. When we eventually learn the truth about taciturn fisherman Joe Gastineau—that he was responsible for a deadly boat accident—it doesn’t come as a surprise, because the guilt has been so legible on his face. That silent ache of guilt also enriches his performance in Eight Men Out (another Sayles collaboration), where he’s a baseball player forced by the greed and corruption of the sports’ higher-ups to join his team in throwing the World Series.
Unquestionably, Sayles has been Strathairn’s most important creative partner. After becoming friends while doing summer stock in New Hampshire in their youths, the director cast Strathairn in his first film, 1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7, and the two worked together five more times over the next two decades. Sayles gave the actor meaty roles while other directors were still casting him as bit parts and caricatures, understanding his immense ability—including the potential he had as a lead (it’s an ensemble piece, but Strathairn is the tortured heart of Eight Men Out). Though the two didn’t collaborate again after Limbo in 1999, and Sayles hasn’t made a feature since 2013, their shared work is among the richest of both men’s careers.
While David Strathairn largely played good guys for Sayles (his extraterrestrial bounty hunter in The Brother from Another Planet being a glorious exception) and his most garlanded role, Ed Murrow, was one of the best guys around, the actor has also amassed a murderers’ row of villains over his decades on screen.
Arguably his most famous is Pierce Patchett in L.A. Confidential: A suave pimp smugly sure that his criminal wrongdoing is too smart to go detected by the oafs of the LAPD. Strathairn’s C.I.A chief, Noah Vosen, in The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Legacy oozes cerebral, bureaucratic malevolence. At the other end of the spectrum is his drunken, abusive husband Joe St. George in Dolores Claiborne, whose sulfurous evil radiates off him like fumes from the beer he’s always pouring down his gullet. The three men are pure evil, but they could hardly be more different; Strathairn’s chameleonic brilliance making them all eminently, unnervingly convincing.
Then there’s his teacher, Mr. Auster, in Blue Car. At first, the movie plays a smart, cruel trick on us, posing as an “inspirational teacher” film. For that while, he is the only stable, supportive adult in the life of Meg (Agnes Bruckner), a troubled poet prodigy in his high school English class. As the action progresses, however, we learn that Auster is a man as empty as the book that supposedly contains his novel, and that his main interest in Meg is as a band-aid for his sad, wounded ego. Though his acts are those of a groomer, Strathairn plays the teacher more as a pathetic, selfish man than an out-and-out predator, and Blue Car is made all the more haunting for that nuance.
While the terms “character actor” and “supporting actor” are often interchangeable, David Strathairn is a performer who slides most readily into the latter category, happy to give a steady bolster to a more showy central performance. In The River Wild, he was the husband of Meryl Streep’s river-rafting expert—they and their son get kidnapped along the rapids by a psychotic Kevin Bacon. Streep inarguably has the bigger role, jousting with Bacon and brainstorming the family’s rescue. Strathairn is there as backup, both in character and as an actor, paving the way for Streep to save them all, and helping her build an unusually grown-up portrait of a marriage that’s struggled, but survived.
He did that again a few years later in A Map of the World, opposite Sigourney Weaver. Weaver’s spiky, misanthropic school nurse gets unjustly jailed after a tragedy, and Strathairn’s husband is forced to step up to the childcare plate for the first time in his life. While the film follows both spouses on their respective journeys, Weaver’s is where the most spectacular conflict lays—and yet Strathairn’s fight through quiet, lonely desperation to find his new normal, and his emotional affair with bereaved mom Julianne Moore, prove just as engaging.
He’s also an expert at balancing showier performances, adding an understated heft to projects, making them richer and deeper. Though he’s only in a handful of scenes in The Firm, as the incarcerated brother of hotshot lawyer Tom Cruise, he and Cruise quickly build a shared fraternal history which is made all the more interesting and convincing by their wildly divergent energies. In Temple Grandin, Strathairn’s kind professor gives Clare Danes’ wonderfully exuberant take on the titular autistic savant some gentle emotional grounding. In Bob Roberts, the earnestness of his defense lawyer for Giancarlo Esposito’s wrongfully imprisoned journalist helps the satire land its serious, heartfelt points. Strathairn is an actor who can quickly and concisely add gravitas to a movie, needing minimal screentime to make an outsized impact.
But that’s not even all he can do. Strathairn’s also adept as a comedian—it’s striking looking back at his very first appearance, as a goofy mechanic in Return of the Secaucus 7, and seeing how vastly different a role it is than the ones he’s best known for today. Yet, he is a man who started off his performance life at clown college, and on too few occasions—Sneakers, The Brother from Another Planet; one barnstorming scene in the otherwise dire With Friends Like These…—he’s been able to let that inner clown out.
Another underused facet of his formidable repertoire is as romantic lead. Once again, we turn to Sayles for the best example of this: Passion Fish. The film casts Strathairn as the love interest of a newly paraplegic soap opera star (Mary McDonnell); one delightful scene sees her having a sexy dream about his Cajun fisherman. The aforementioned Sayles project Limbo centers around his romance with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s world-weary lounge singer. Both films make use of his tender, soulfulness; his ability to listen with his whole being, and to play men who are sturdy and practical without being macho. Although the idea of Strathairn-as-love-interest did have something of a revival in Nomadland, it’s lain dormant for much of his career. A shame!
It’s hard to find a throughline for an actor like David Strathairn, who’s worked in almost every genre and embodied a stupefying range of characters, disappearing readily into every one. Watching his filmography in order, it’s difficult to plot a trajectory—he’ll follow enormous franchise movies with ones that look like they cost five dollars to make; take a rare leading role, and then appear for a grand total of 45 seconds in his next project. He’s clearly drawn to historical pieces, is happy to play second fiddle to a female lead, enjoys working as part of a large ensemble…but that’s just the tip of his iceberg.
Making my way through these 92 films, it became ever more clear how David Strathairn, deftly and unassumingly, represents the traits that all actors should aspire to: The ability to do a lot with a little, the humility to submit yourself to your co-stars and the material, the willingness and curiosity to be forever trying new things, the range and talent to excel at them. We are so very lucky to have him.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.