James Marshall
James Marshall is an actor, born 1967.
Born James David Greenblatt in Queens in 1967, he took the professional name James Marshall and by the start of the 1990s he had the two credits that still define him. The first was James Hurley, one of the teenagers orbiting Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, a part he carried into the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and back again for the 2017 revival.
The second arrived the same year as the prequel. As Private First Class Louden Downey in A Few Good Men, he is the quiet half of a two-man defence, and the performance works by subtraction: the film belongs to its talkers, and his job is to sit at the defence table looking like a young man who genuinely does not understand what is being argued over his head. He is very good at that particular register, a kind of bruised blankness that reads as either soulfulness or stupidity depending on what the scene needs.
Around those, the record is a run of early-1990s leads that did not compound: a military stockade drama in 1990, a boxing picture in 1992, a 2001 thriller, and by 2002 a bit part as a courthouse door guard. In 2010 he sued a pharmaceutical company over an acne drug, saying the illness that followed had taken years out of his acting career.
Movies (8)
TV (2)
Where to start with James Marshall
Start with Twin Peaks. James Hurley is the show's straight line, the ordinary boy the strangeness happens around, and the role only looks thin until you notice how much of the town's grief he is asked to carry while everyone else gets the jokes. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is the harder companion piece, colder and much less charmed by its own quirk, and his scenes there play as an argument about what the series had been softening.
Then A Few Good Men, where he barely speaks and still holds the frame against far louder work. After that the shelf is smaller: Cadence puts him in a military prison, the 1992 Gladiator puts him in a boxing ring and has no connection to the Roman one, and Down is for completists. High Crimes is a walk-on, worth it only if you like spotting people.