· Image Search

You sure don't look like a William Forsythe. You look more like an Ernest Paxton, or an Alton Owens, or a Sergeant Buck Atwater, or an Evelle, or a "Pigiron," or a "Pug Face Crusher" -- names, each and every one, of characters that you've played, in movies like The Rock and Extreme Prejudice and Raising Arizona and Savage Dawn. Which is to say, either a dangerously amoral special agent or a bad-seed police officer or a backwards, inbred country boy. Which is what you play in pretty much every movie.

Don't you know that actors named William Forsythe are supposed to be tall and distinguished with silver-grey hair, and play captains of industry, or the curmudgeonly rich man in an Olsen twins' movie who's constantly grimacing and shaking his fist as the Olsens run roughshod through the mansion, but who eventually discovers that he, too, is a kid at heart? Or that you should be playing a character like Blake Carrington, the patriarch of the Carrington family on Dynasty, for nine years, like John Forsythe did?

John Forsythe...your father!

Yes, it's true, William Forsythe. You are the son of the original silver-haired patriarch. You are the son of Blake Carrington. You are the son of the voice of Charlie on Charlie's Angels! Don't think we don't know this, William Forsythe. Or at least don't think we don't know this since we looked it up after we saw you as "Hardcastle" in Blue Streak.

You are a fine character actor, William Forsythe -- especially so as John Goodman's squealing and shit-grinning sidekick in Raising Arizona. And maybe you thought that carrying your father's name might help you in your own fledgling career, and maybe it has. But now is the time for the charade to end.

Let us tell you a little story, William Forsythe. Your father, John Forsythe, was actually born John Lincoln Freund, son of a Wall Street businessman. But he had the good sense to change his name to John Forsythe once it became apparent that he was to become an actor who'd spend his career playing distinguished, silver-haired gentlemen -- characters with names like Blake Carrington and Rex Roper and Reade Jamieson and Dr. Robert Kier. And so now you, William Forsythe, son of a character actor, must change your name, to Randy Braxton or Skip Knox or Buck Mullett, as it has become apparent that you will spend your career playing dimwitted hayseeds or rogue cops.

We recommend Skip Knox.