Will Oldham
The acting came first. Will Oldham was on screen in 1987 as Danny Radnor in Matewan, years before any of the records that made his name, and the shape of his career since has been a slow return to that starting point.
The music dominates the middle of it. Between 1993 and 1997 he released work under a shifting set of Palace names, collaborating with dozens of other musicians, and from 1998 he adopted Bonnie "Prince" Billy for most of what followed. None of those records are among the credits listed here, which makes this page a deliberately partial portrait: it shows the actor and hides the songwriter.
As an actor he has become a specific and useful thing, which is the man in a small American film who says the strange, plain sentence that reframes the scene around him. He is Icky in Wendy and Lucy, Bill Mooney in Junebug, a bartender in The Bikeriders, and, in A Ghost Story, a character credited only as Prognosticator, a job title that tells you exactly what he gets hired for. He has also done voice work on Xavier: Renegade Angel, a piece of late-night animation about as far from a folk record as it is possible to travel.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Will Oldham
Chronology says Matewan, a young Oldham in a serious 1987 drama that predates the music entirely and is still the biggest role he has had. But for the actor he actually became, watch Wendy and Lucy, where his Icky occupies very little of the film and sets the moral temperature of all of it. A Ghost Story contains the monologue people quote, delivered by a character credited only as Prognosticator, and it is the single best use anyone has made of him on screen. Junebug is the warm one. The Bikeriders is a bit part in a bigger film, and Xavier: Renegade Angel is by a distance the strangest thing on this list, worth ten minutes of anyone's curiosity.