The news that Maury Chaykin died in Toronto, on his 61st birthday, came just hours after the big TIFF press conference Tuesday (July 27) where Barney’s Version and Casino Jack were announced as Gala presentations. Chaykin’s in both of them. It’ll be weird not seeing him making the rounds at the festival he seemed to be in something every year.
From the early 1980s onward, Chaykin – who emigrated to Canada from U.S. in the 1970s, landed a guest spot on King Of Kensington and never looked back – was the go-to actor for a specific type of character. He excelled at surly, wily, antagonistic fellows whose gimlet eyes and insincere grins inevitably hinted at unknown intellectual and emotional depths. Whe ther his smile concealed wisdom or depravity was always his secret.
Atom Egoyan found a part for him in just about every movie he made from The Adjuster onward. John Boorman cast him as a well-spoken vagrant adopted by mad siblings Suzy Amis, David Hewlett and Uma Thurman in Where The Heart Is. He turned up in WarGames and My Cousin Vinny. In Cutthroat Island and Devil In A Blue Dress. In The Mask Of Zorro and Entrapment.
On TV, he played Rex Stout’s detective Nero Wolfe in a series of projects for American cable. Most recently, he’d had a regular gig on the Citytv series Less Than Kind.
Chaykin didn’t get a lot of starring parts, probably because he was no one’s vision of a leading man. In 1994, he played a character inspired by Brian Wilson in an adaptation of Paul Quarrington’s novel Whale Music he could have coasted on an image of the Beach Boy we all knew, but instead he created something specific and original.
My favourite Chaykin performance is in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves, where he plays Costner’s unhinged commanding officer. He does his single terrifying scene at full throttle – raging incomprehensibly at Costner about orders and strategy before blowing his brains out – but he layers it with a strange note of shameful apology, as though he’s mortified to be losing his mind in front of a fellow officer.
It’s a haunting choice that suggests a much more complex character than we get to know in the film. And that’s why you hired Maury Chaykin.[rssbreak]
