· Image Search

R. Lee Ermey was born to play mean army guys. Well, maybe he wasn't born to it, exactly, but clearly he must have been reared for it. Something must have occurred in his formative childhood years that made it easy for him to pretend (or "pretend") to be a loud, aggressive, angry, screaming, spitting adult of the kind that, if movies are to be believed, populate the U.S. military. And frankly, the southern accent doesn't hurt.

Some might argue that it's mere circumstance that has turned Ermey into the sine qua non of mean fictional army guys -- the circumstance being his chance casting as mean Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket. If the IMDb is to be believed (and it often is not), Ermey wasn't Kubrick's first choice to play the sadistic Hartman; Ermey was hired as a consultant to teach the original actor how to portray a drill sergeant convincingly, but did so much better a job that Kubrick ended up firing the original Hartman and giving the role to Ermey instead. Regardless of whether that bit of trivia is true, embodying Hartman meant that forever after, Ermey would be associated with the single least romantic portrayal of army service in film history: Jacket sets up Hartman as a tender-hearted soldier's worst nightmare. He's really good at the part of drill sergeanting where he destroys the soldier's sense of individuality and sheer will to live; he's not so hot at the part where he's supposed to build up the soldier's self-esteem again by making him appreciate his part within the team. Or so he comes to appreciate when Pvt. Leonard Lawrence (played by a young and doughy Vincent D'Onofrio) cracks under Hartman's relentless abuse and commits spectacular suicide. (More happens in the movie after that, but does anyone really remember or care about all that crap with Matthew Modine after basic training? We don't.)

So those same "some"s mentioned above would say that it was inevitable that Ermey should continue playing mean army guys after Hartman: playing a role like that would stamp him indelibly as a mean army guy forever after. We might agree, except for the fact that D'Onofrio's Lawrence is equally memorable (and Hartman wouldn't seem like such a complete bastard if there were no Lawrence against which to contrast him -- there is no Hartman without Lawrence, you might even say), and yet he has emerged as one of the most chameleonic actors of his generation, ping-ponging from Orson Welles to Abbie Hoffman, from a crazy prosthetic-nose-wearing junkie in The Salton Sea to a brilliant detective on Law & Order: Criminal Intent (which might as well be called Law & Order: Vincent D'Onofrio, and frequently is, since it often devolves into nothing more than a scenery buffet for D'Onofrio and his trademark D'Onofrionics...but we digress). The point is, D'Onofrio's post-Jacket roles prove that it's probably not Jacket alone that has dictated Ermey's subsequent typecasting as a mean army guy. Particularly since Ermey's three pre-Jacket acting roles were as army guys. (Whether said army guys were mean is not clear.)

Now Ermey always plays mean army guys. It's like he figured, "Well, my name kind of sounds like 'army' -- why fight it?" He plays army guys in movies and TV shows about the army (China Beach, The Siege of Firebase Gloria). He plays army guys in movies and TV shows not about the army (Under the Hula Moon, Civil Wars). He plays the ghosts of army guys (The Frighteners). Even when only his voice is called for, he plays army guys (Toy Story and Toy Story 2, The Simpsons). Even in videogames, he plays army guys. Okay, yes, it's true that he occasionally mixes it up by playing a mean cop, but same diff -- it's still basically the same credit over and over: Sheriff. Sheriff. Marine. General. General. Colonel. Coach. Captain. Colonel. Army Sarge. General. Older Sheriff. Colonel. Sheriff. Lieutenant. You get the picture. Even when he tosses in a Senator or President or Secretary of State, it's the same role: he's Southern. He's irascible. He'll spit in your face as soon as look at you, son!

This week, Ermey makes the brave choice to break from his usual type by playing a mean boss in a non-military setting, in Willard. Since the commercials suggest that Crispin Glover's army (heh) of homicidal rats eat Ermey's character alive, it's probably best that he get back to the base, where he is more likely to be the one dispensing the physical and verbal insults, and less often on the receiving end of...well, dismemberment by rodents.