R. D. Call
The credit list reads like a job description. Duty Sergeant. Courtroom Guard. Coast Guard Officer. Cop at Park. D.A. Rynerson. Roy Dana Call was an American character actor of the kind American films of the 1980s and 1990s could not function without: the man in the doorway who tells the protagonist what the rules are and does not care whether he likes them.
He was in an unusual number of good films while doing it. 48 Hrs., Brewster's Millions, At Close Range, No Man's Land, Colors, Young Guns II, State of Grace, Waterworld, Murder by Numbers, Into the Wild. Wikipedia also lists Born on the Fourth of July and Babel, neither of which appears against his name here.
Where directors gave him more, he took it. Dickie in At Close Range and Nicholson in State of Grace are both proper supporting parts in bleak crime pictures, and Jack McCool in Last Man Standing is the sort of heavy that has to establish a threat in two scenes. Harry Dieter in L.A. Takedown is another. On television there is Jude Andrews in Golden Years, and Michael Dugan in EZ Streets, which is the closest he came to a leading role.
Our records do not carry his birth or death dates, and Wikipedia writes about him in the past tense without supplying them either. What survives is the filmography, which is a better memorial than most leading men get.
Movies (19)
- Waterworld (1995)
- Into the Wild (2007)
- I Am Sam (2001)
- 48 Hrs. (1982)
- Young Guns II (1990)
- Colors (1988)
- Murder by Numbers (2002)
- State of Grace (1990)
- Last Man Standing (1996)
- No Man's Land (1987)
- Brewster's Millions (1985)
- At Close Range (1986)
- The Work and the Glory III: A House Divided (2006)
- Other People's Money (1991)
- Code of Honor (2016)
- The Weight of Water (2001)
- Logan's War: Bound by Honor (1998)
- Judgment in Berlin (1988)
- L.A. Takedown (1989)
TV (2)
Where to start with R. D. Call
There is no headline performance to send you to, so go by film instead. At Close Range is the best one he is in and gives him a real part, in a very cold rural crime drama that has aged well.
State of Grace is the other serious pick, a gangster film with an extraordinary cast that never found its audience. Colors and 48 Hrs. are the ones where you will recognise him as exactly the sort of officer he specialised in.
For the popcorn, Waterworld casts him as an Enforcer and is far more entertaining than its reputation, and Last Man Standing is a handsome, empty gangster Western where he gets to be properly nasty.
The television is worth a detour if you can find it. EZ Streets gave him the biggest role of his career, and Golden Years is the odd early-1990s serial. Into the Wild is the late credit most people will have seen without noticing.