Robert Prescott
Two parts, a year apart, still define Prescott, and that is less of a complaint than it sounds. Cole Whittier in Bachelor Party (1984) and Kent in Real Genius (1985) are both the character an audience waits to see taken down, and playing that well is a specific skill. Smugness is easy to overdo and unwatchable when it is overdone; he kept his just plausible enough that the humiliation felt earned rather than arranged. A cameo as the Sand Cruiser Driver in Spaceballs (1987) rounds off that phase.
The later career is a completely different animal. From the mid-2000s he turns up in the margins of serious adult American thrillers, always as some kind of functionary: Mr. Verne in Michael Clayton, a process server in Burn After Reading, an Air Force officer in The Bourne Legacy, Adam Hilliard in Roman J. Israel, Esq., a detective in Cold Comes the Night.
Small, grey, unglamorous parts, and a genuinely unusual second act for a man whose face was once shorthand for eighties rich-kid entitlement. Very few actors get to be typecast twice in opposite directions.
Movies (10)
Where to start with Robert Prescott
Go to Real Genius first, an unusually smart eighties campus comedy in which Prescott's Kent supplies most of the plot's friction. It has aged far better than its poster ever suggested it would.
Bachelor Party is the cruder companion piece, worth it mainly to watch the same type played louder and dirtier, while Spaceballs gives him a cameo and nothing more.
The later run holds the surprise. Michael Clayton is the best film he has ever been in, Burn After Reading the funniest, The Bourne Legacy the biggest, and in all three he is simply a man in a suit doing a job, which is oddly satisfying after the eighties material. Roman J. Israel, Esq. and Cold Comes the Night complete the set for anyone keeping score.