Gary Sinise
Gary Sinise is an actor, born 1955.
Sinise came out of Chicago theatre rather than television. He was part of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, directed and starred in a 1983 production of Sam Shepard's True West that won him an Obie, collected four Tony nominations including The Grapes of Wrath and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and took the Tony regional theatre award alongside the company. He directed, produced and starred in the 1992 film of Of Mice and Men, playing George.
What he brings to a camera is stillness with a grievance underneath it. Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump is remembered for the shouting, but the performance lives in the flat, contemptuous quiet before it, a man whose entire family script has been taken away from him. It brought an Academy Award nomination. Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13 is the same instrument used calmly: an astronaut scrubbed from the flight who then sits in a simulator doing the arithmetic that gets the crew home. He is good at competence and better at competence that has been insulted.
The range narrowed as he went. The late 1990s gave him hard genre work in Ransom, Snake Eyes and The Green Mile, plus two turns as George Wallace, in the television film of that name and again in Path to War, and both his Emmy and his Golden Globe came from television. Then CSI: NY took the better part of a decade as Mac Taylor. Away from acting he founded the Gary Sinise Foundation and the Lt. Dan Band, named for the Forrest Gump role, which plays United States military bases around the world, and that work has been the larger part of his public life for years.
Movies (28)
- Forrest Gump (1994)
- The Green Mile (1999)
- Apollo 13 (1995)
- Open Season (2006)
- The Quick and the Dead (1995)
- The Forgotten (2004)
- Ransom (1996)
- Snake Eyes (1998)
- Mission to Mars (2000)
- Of Mice and Men (1992)
- Of Mice and Men (1992)
- Reindeer Games (2000)
- I Still Believe (2020)
- Impostor (2001)
- Joe Bell (2020)
- The Human Stain (2003)
- The Big Bounce (2004)
- Albino Alligator (1997)
- Truman (1995)
- Path to War (2003)
- Jack the Bear (1993)
- George Wallace (1997)
- All the Rage (1999)
- Bruno (2000)
- Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon (2005)
- A Midnight Clear (1992)
- The Best of The Tony Awards: The Plays (2006)
- The Most Magical Story on Earth: 50 Years of Walt Disney World (2021)
TV (9)
Where to start with Gary Sinise
Forrest Gump is where nearly everyone starts and it is the right choice, though watch Lieutenant Dan rather than the plot around him: the bitterness is played much more finely than the film's reputation suggests.
Apollo 13 next, for the opposite temperature. Mattingly is controlled competence throughout, and Sinise plays the humiliation of being grounded without a single line about it. Then Of Mice and Men, which he directed and stars in, and which is the best evidence that his instincts are theatrical rather than cinematic.
On television, The Stand is the sprawling one with him as its decent centre and George Wallace is his strongest lead. Ransom and Snake Eyes are late-1990s thrillers that use his straight-arrow presence in ways the trailers did not advertise. The Green Mile is a small part played with unusual care, and CSI: NY is the long procedural for comfort viewing.
The films everyone knows
Lieutenant Dan is the part that changed his life, and the Oscar nomination undersells how much of Forrest Gump's weight he carries. Apollo 13 and The Green Mile are the other two most people have seen.
Steppenwolf on screen
He co-founded Steppenwolf at eighteen and the theatre training is what the film work is built on. Of Mice and Men is the one he directed and starred in, and it is the closest the screen work gets to the stage.
Television and the long runs
CSI: NY ran nine seasons and is the work that paid for the foundation. The Stand is the King miniseries, and the documentary appearances are almost all about veterans or the space programme, which is not a coincidence.