Josh Brolin vs. Craig Sheffer vs. David Boreanaz
Battle of the Beefy Squinters

One night, as I was flipping through the channels, I came across Buffy the Vampire Slayer and saw Buffy cavorting with her slab-o'-beef vampire sometime-boyfriend, and I thought to myself, "It's nice to see that Craig Sheffer is getting some work" -- a statement that's false on two entirely separate levels. First of all, Craig Sheffer is getting a lot of work, thank you very much; in fact, in the '90s alone, he's done thirty-one movies and TV series, of which you've heard of, maybe, five: Sleep With Me, The Program, A River Runs Through It, Some Kind of Wonderful...okay, four, and one of those was in the '80s. (In an earlier Reasonable Person interview, Sheffer's name came up as the kind of actor who could have, should have, been in The Program. Turns out he was. [My bad. -- WC]) Secondly, that wasn't Craig Sheffer, of course, on Buffy -- it was David Boreanaz, Craig Sheffer's identical twin brother.

In some sense, Craig Sheffer could be nervous about the ascendance of his identical twin, in the way that, say, Peter Gallagher could be nervous about the ascendance of his identical twin, Johnathan Schaech. But Sheffer probably has the straight-to-cable action movie genre all to himself, for now; it seems unlikely that he'll suffer an awkward run-in with Boreanaz at the screen test for Double Take II: Off the Rails. And besides, both he and Boreanaz have a bigger head ache to worry about: Josh Brolin -- their identical triplet.

Josh Brolin first came to my attention in Mimic, in which he played a character named "Josh." (Never a good sign; maybe it was just a coincidence, but I always assume that actors who go by their real names in films do so to avoid any ongoing confusion during the shoot.)

Can all three survive? They are essentially the same person: beefy, squinty, mumbly. Sheffer had the headstart; Boreanaz has his own show; Brolin has the celebrity pedigree. Normally, I'd go with Brolin, but since Hollywood's become so clogged with celebrity offspring of late, it now seems that a famous father is no longer enough to ensure even moderate stardom. (Freddie Prinze Jr., yes; Jake Busey, no.) Hollywood seems to be priming the pump for Boreanaz, but really: it's a show called Angel that takes place in L.A. about a vampire detective, for crying out loud. Unless it is pure genuis, it will tank.

Plus, my heart's with Sheffer, if only because his snide preppie in Some Kind of Wonderful was, for my money, the consummate snide preppie of the eighties. Besides, he's time-tested, he knows his niche, and he's dug in like a tick.

Advantage: The Sheffster.