Gerard Parkes

Gerard Parkes was born in Dublin and moved to Toronto in 1956, and the second half of that sentence explains the shape of his filmography. He worked out of Canada for four decades, in Canadian films that rarely travelled and in American productions that came north to shoot.

Then Jim Henson cast him as Doc, the inventor in the workshop above Fraggle Rock, and handed him the odd distinction of being the only human regular in a show otherwise made of puppets. That is a stranger acting job than it sounds, and Parkes played it with a patience that never tipped over into performing at children. He carried the same character into A Muppet Family Christmas.

In 1999 he was cast as Doc again, this time the bartender in Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints, and returned for the sequel exactly a decade later. Between the two Docs sits a remarkable run of clergy: Father Gorenzel in Trapped in Paradise, Father Patrick Keeley in Mother Night, Father Foley in Common Ground, unnamed priests in Short Circuit 2 and It Takes Two. Casting directors clearly saw a collar when they looked at him. The best of the serious work is Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster, where he is simply a man called Tim and the film gives him room to be unsettling.