Ian Buchanan
Ian Buchanan is an actor, born 1957.
The accent did a lot of the work. Ian Buchanan, born in Hamilton in 1957, arrived in American daytime television with a Scottish voice and a manner suggesting he had wandered in from somewhere considerably grander, and the soaps kept him busy for decades across General Hospital, Port Charles, The Bold and the Beautiful, All My Children and Days of Our Lives. He has a Daytime Emmy for supporting work in a drama series to show for it.
Prime time used him more strangely, and better. David Lynch cast him twice: as Dick Tremayne in the second season of Twin Peaks, and as Lester Guy in On the Air. Tremayne is one of the great comic irritants in American television, a man whose vanity is so total that it curdles back into a kind of innocence, and Buchanan plays him without a flicker of apology or a wink to the audience. Lester Guy is the same instinct turned up until it screams.
Everything since has traded on that register. He turns up in Panic Room, plays Stan Kovacs in the 1990 version of The Flash, and, in a piece of casting that gets the joke exactly right, voices Ultra-Humanite in Justice League, a villain who has to sound genuinely cultured rather than merely posh. Comedy has used him too, from It's Garry Shandling's Show onward through Yes, Dear and Old Dogs & New Tricks. The pattern holds: put him in a room, let him condescend, and the scene works.
Movies (3)
TV (10)
Where to start with Ian Buchanan
It has to be Twin Peaks. Dick Tremayne arrives in the second season and gives the show one of its most purely comic threads, and Buchanan commits to the pomposity so completely that it stops being a joke about one man and becomes a joke about the entire town's manners.
Stay with Lynch and go to On the Air, a much stranger and far less loved thing, where the same manner curdles into desperation. It is the closest he comes to a lead anywhere on this list.
After that, pick by mood. Justice League is the best use of the voice, Panic Room is the biggest film, The Seventh Sign is the earliest horror, and It's Garry Shandling's Show shows how neatly the manner sits inside a sitcom. His daytime work, which is the bulk of the career and the reason he is famous in America, sits outside the credits listed here.