Robert Joy
Robert Joy is an actor, born 1951.
Robert Joy has spent forty-odd years being the most interesting person in the second row. Born in St. John's, Newfoundland in 1951, he is a two-time Genie Award nominee for Best Supporting Actor, for Atlantic City (1980) and Whole New Thing, and his early credits run through the kind of films that get taught: Ragtime (1981), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) as Jim, Woody Allen's Radio Days and later Shadows and Fog.
The unusual thing about him is the width of the gap between his registers. On one side is Sid Hammerback, the medical examiner on CSI: NY, a soft-spoken and precise man doing careful work in a morgue. On the other is Lizard in The Hills Have Eyes, a mutant buried under heavy prosthetics. Most character actors pick a lane. Joy runs both and is equally plausible in each, which is why horror directors and network procedurals kept calling at the same time.
The genre list is long and unapologetic: Charlie in George Romero's Land of the Dead, Colonel Stevens in Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, the Ledger Guy in Waterworld, Amityville 3-D, The Dark Half, and more recently Henry Kavanaugh on FROM.
He has kept a foot in prestige work throughout. Welty Blackwell in The Goldfinch, Congressman Tenant in Don't Look Up, and a run of theatre and television that never quite made him famous and never left him idle.
Movies (36)
- The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
- Don't Look Up (2021)
- Waterworld (1995)
- Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)
- Fallen (1998)
- Superhero Movie (2008)
- Land of the Dead (2005)
- Pretty Persuasion (2005)
- The Goldfinch (2019)
- Harriet the Spy (1996)
- It's a Boy Girl Thing (2006)
- Sweet November (2001)
- Ragtime (1981)
- Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994)
- Joe Somebody (2001)
- Resurrection (1999)
- Perfume (2001)
- Helter Skelter (2004)
- Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
- Radio Days (1987)
- 61* (2001)
- The Dark Half (1993)
- Shadows and Fog (1991)
- I'll Do Anything (1994)
- Millennium (1989)
- Just Ask My Children (2001)
- Atlantic City (1980)
- Haven (2001)
- Big Shots (1987)
- Amityville 3-D (1983)
TV (10)
Where to start with Robert Joy
Chronologically, Atlantic City is the starting point and still the best-made film he appears in. But for what he actually does, watch Desperately Seeking Susan and then The Hills Have Eyes back to back, because the distance between those two performances is the whole argument.
CSI: NY is where most people know him from, and Sid Hammerback is a genuinely good procedural character: warm, odd, never played for quirk. Land of the Dead is the Romero credit and worth it if you like the series. Radio Days is the sweetest thing on his list.
Newer work: FROM gives him a proper ongoing role in a show that is better than its premise suggests, and The Goldfinch wastes most of its cast but not him.