William Sadler

William Sadler, born in Buffalo, New York in 1950, started on Broadway, including Neil Simon's Biloxi Blues in 1985, and has been one of American film's most reliable character actors ever since. He does two entirely different jobs well, which is rarer than a long credit list suggests.

The first is menace. He is the villain in Die Hard 2 in 1990, a role he plays with a stillness that the film keeps trying to make more theatrical than it needs to be, and he is Jim in The Mist, a frightened man who becomes dangerous precisely because he is frightened, which is the most useful thing anyone does in that film. He was President Matthew Ellis across the Marvel films and television, a piece of casting that works because he can look like authority without doing anything.

The second job is comedy played completely straight, and it is where he is most valuable. His Grim Reaper in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey is a full Bergman parody, an accent and a robe and total commitment, losing at board games to two idiots and getting quietly furious about it. That performance is thirty years old and still the first thing many people say about him; he returned to it in Bill and Ted Face the Music in 2020. In between there is a career of steady work with good directors, Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption, Klaus Detterick in The Green Mile, Chesty Puller in The Pacific, plus a Saturn Award and a long run of Jesse Stone television films as Gino Fish.