Fred Dryer
Fred Dryer is an actor, born 1946.
Fred Dryer had a full career before the one that made him famous. He was a defensive end in the NFL for thirteen seasons, with the New York Giants and then the Los Angeles Rams, retiring in 1981 at a size Hollywood found immediately useful: six feet six, and built like the job he had just left.
Hunter, which began in 1984, was the payoff. He played Rick Hunter, a Los Angeles detective in the lineage of every cop who solves things by ignoring procedure, and the show ran on into the nineties on the strength of one simple thing. Dryer was not a trained actor and never pretended otherwise, so instead of performing toughness he simply occupied the frame, which is a real screen quality and cannot be taught. The dialogue was disposable. The physical fact of him was not.
Everything else in the filmography sits either around Hunter or after it. He brought the character back for a television film in 1995, and has since worked as a character actor in small parts: a sheriff in Bumblebee, a highway patrolman in Cannonball Run II, a detective in The Wrong Woman, a supporting role in the sitcom Accidentally on Purpose, a part in the series Crisis. There is also one credit that captures the hinge of his whole life in a single line, Monday Night Football, listing him as a defensive end.
Movies (5)
TV (4)
Where to start with Fred Dryer
Hunter is the entire proposition, so put on an early episode and accept what it is: a mid-eighties network cop show with a formula, a car and a lead whose appeal is almost purely physical. It is comfort television of a very pure kind and it was popular for good reasons.
The Return of Hunter: Everyone Walks in L.A. is the revival television movie and strictly for people who got attached. Of the later work, Bumblebee is by a distance the best film he appears in, though the part is tiny, and Cannonball Run II is the period curiosity, a picture stuffed with celebrities doing very little. Crisis and Accidentally on Purpose are late television jobs. Monday Night Football is hardly a credit at all, but it is the one that explains all the others.