Lance Guest
Lance Guest is an actor, born 1960.
Lance Guest made his screen debut in Halloween II, playing Jimmy alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, and then took the part that fixed him permanently in one decade's imagination. In The Last Starfighter he is Alex Rogan, the trailer-park kid whose arcade high score is a recruitment test in disguise. It is the purest wish-fulfilment premise of 1984, and it works because Guest plays it as an ordinary teenager instead of a hero.
Three years later he joined the Brody family in Jaws: The Revenge as Michael, which is the other thing that happens to young leads: a franchise hands you its fourth film. The 1980s run largely ends there.
Television carried him afterwards, in series work including Lou Grant and Cassie & Co., and he kept turning up in genre films, most substantially as James Griffin in the werewolf picture Late Phases. Between 2010 and 2012 he played Johnny Cash in the musical Million Dollar Quartet, on and off Broadway, a credit not among the ones listed here.
He now occupies the position a lot of 1980s genre leads end up in, interviewed as a witness. He appears as himself in the documentary In Search of Tomorrow, which is about precisely that decade of science fiction.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with Lance Guest
Everything starts with The Last Starfighter. It is the film he will always be introduced by, an early experiment in computer-generated spaceships wrapped around a very sweet story about a kid leaving home, and Guest holds the middle of it with almost no vanity.
Halloween II is the better-made film and the sensible second watch, a direct continuation of the first night that gives him a decent supporting role inside a genuine horror classic's shadow. Jaws: The Revenge is the famous misstep. Go in curious and with low expectations, and not for him.
The most interesting adult performance is Late Phases, a low-budget werewolf film with an unusual amount of feeling in it, where he plays James Griffin. In Search of Tomorrow puts his 1980s in context with him talking about it directly, and early television like Lou Grant is for completists only.