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Hi, I'm John Heard. I'm not John Hurt. I'm also not John Glover. Both of them are craggy, fey, fiftyish British men (okay, fine, Glover's American, but he might as well be British), whereas I'm a tight-assed American with a talent for cinematic bluster. You probably know me best from my role as Tom Hanks's antagonist in Big. Indeed that role does stand as the apex of my career playing bland yuppie scum.

What I bring to all my roles is a subtle mournfulness, because only I know what it is to carry the white man's burden. Mine is the burden of puffy self-satisfaction that's destined to be punctured (if not annihilated) by some man-child or other. It's the burden of having built a life based on all of society's male myths, and then finding myself in a situation that shows me how false all those myths are. It's the burden of watching Elizabeth Perkins date a thirty-year-old virgin, in spite of the fact that I play squash and drive a BMW.

I'd like to bust out of my mold. I really would. But look at me. I'm humorless and prim. I'll never be a leading man; I was made to be an obstacle to the leading man's happiness, and that's all I'll ever be.

Don't cry for me. I'm already dead.