· Image Search

We like Henry Czerny. He's a great actor. And, admittedly, he doesn't always play dicks.

But when he does play dicks, he plays them so very, very well.

And in our defense, there are worse things we could have called him. He's still probably best remembered for playing the malevolent Brother Peter Lavin in The Boys of St. Vincent in 1992, a performance that was a tour de force, bravura, and several other foreign words that mean "very good." And Brother Peter Lavin was, to put it mildly, a dick. He was a dick squared. He was so dick he was dack.

Czerny (pronounced "churny,"like what you might say after tasting good butter in the pioneer days) has also played lesser-grade dicks in Mission Impossible (asshole-ish secret agent Eugene Kittridge) and The Ice Storm (smarmy swinger wannabe George Clair). He's currently part of the All-Stars of Canada cast of the surprise hit The Exorcism of Emily Rose, starring alongside shiny-pated thespianic maestro Colm Feore. (What? No part as a sleazy husband for Bruce Greenwood? No role for Maury Chaykin as a soft-hearted housebound sleuth?)

Maybe it's just lingering resonance from Brother Lavin, but Czerny also tends to play a lot of priests, including Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Witch Trials and Father Raymond McBride in Possessed. He does have a preternaturally-- almost supernaturally -- calm demeanour that can easily be twisted into dickishness and beyond. Or maybe he just gets stuck in a lot of Crucible rip-offs in which the message is, essentially, "Who's the real dick here? The witch/demon/succubus or the guy in the white collar?"

In any case, Czerny's one of the few character guys handsome enough to handle leading-man roles, and he's a hell of an actor to boot. We'd love to see more of him. We would not, however, love to see more of him in the upcoming Pink Panther remake, starring Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau. That just seems like one dick too many.