Fred Thompson
Fred Thompson is an actor, born 1942.
Two careers, each one quietly paying for the other. Thompson was a lawyer and a Washington operator who became a United States senator from Tennessee in 1994, served until 2003, and ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. In between, and on either side, he was one of the most reliably cast character actors in American film.
He was never asked to act, exactly. He was asked to walk in and be the man who outranks everyone in the room, and he had the voice, the height and the unhurried delivery to make it stick without effort. In 1990 alone he turned up in Die Hard 2, The Hunt for Red October and Days of Thunder. The credit list reads like an organizational chart: a rear admiral, a CIA director, an FBI agent, an FBI director, a sheriff, a district attorney, President Grant. He played a senator on screen in 1993, the year before he became one, and played himself as a senator on screen after he had stopped being one.
The limitation is obvious: one register, deployed well. It served him best when a film needed institutional weight fast, as Cape Fear and In the Line of Fire did. His last stretch mixed a Law and Order run as district attorney Arthur Branch with faith-based and regional films, including a turn as William Jennings Bryan in a Scopes trial drama. He died in 2015.
Movies (26)
- Cape Fear (1991)
- Sinister (2012)
- Die Hard 2 (1990)
- The Hunt for Red October (1990)
- Baby's Day Out (1994)
- Days of Thunder (1990)
- Secretariat (2010)
- In the Line of Fire (1993)
- Racing Stripes (2005)
- No Way Out (1987)
- God's Not Dead 2 (2016)
- Curly Sue (1991)
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007)
- White Sands (1992)
- Thunderheart (1992)
- Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)
- 90 Minutes in Heaven (2015)
- Born Yesterday (1993)
- Necessary Roughness (1991)
- Iron Eagle III (1992)
- Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
- 23 Blast (2014)
- Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006)
- Class Action (1991)
- Bed of Lies (1992)
- Alleged (2010)
TV (3)
Where to start with Fred Thompson
For the pure Thompson experience, start with The Hunt for Red October, where he has very little screen time and uses all of it to make a carrier admiral sound like the only adult in the Atlantic. Then Die Hard 2, which casts the same authority as an obstacle rather than a comfort.
In the Line of Fire and Cape Fear are the best films on the list and give him the most to push against, particularly the former, where the man he plays is a genuinely irritating obstacle. Law & Order is where most Americans actually know him from, and dipping into any Arthur Branch season shows why the casting was so obvious. For the strange late stuff, Sinister has him as a sheriff enjoying himself, and Secretariat is the gentlest use anyone made of him.