Some actors just tickle you.  It’s a highly personal thing.  I’m pretty much immune to the alleged charms of most “funny” guys in Hollywood, from Jerry Lewis to Jim Carey to Jack Black – I’ll admit they can (and do) have their moments but for me their signal to noise ratio falls squarely in the category of static.  I tend to get my yuks from character actors, guys you don’t think of as comedians but who nonetheless make you laugh.  Olin Howlin, for example.  You probably know him, if you know him at all, as the Old Man who becomes the first victim of THE BLOB (1958) but that was actually his last movie – his career went back to the silent era and he was always reliable as an addle-pated civil servant (from sheriffs to morticians to comical drunks, he played ‘em all).  These days, that kind of classic characterization is pretty rare but I see it alive and thriving in the person of Ray Wise.

All Ray Wise has to do is smile to get me to smile.  The guy’s got a set of megawatt chompers that is just unreal – at certain angles, he looks like a LOONEY TUNES caricature of a Hollywood leading man, with a head just a smidge too big for the rest of him.  Lately, he’s been flashing these pearlies to infernal effect as Satan on the recently-axed but otherwise worthwhile Touchstone Television series REAPER.  It’s the perfect role for this veteran film and TV actor, who has played nobodies and nemeses, heroes and villains with equal aplomb.  Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1947, and raised in Akron’s Firestone Park, Raymond Herbert Wise was inspired by his Romanian heritage to become a junior expert on Dracula and all things related to the immortal character created by Bram Stoker – little did he know at that time how deeply involved and associated he would become with horror, science fiction and the fantastic later on in life.  Professing a desire to be an actor as early as age 13, Wise made his stage debut in 1965 at Akron’s Weathervane Playhouse.  After earning a degree at Kent State University, he was cast as Jamie Rawlins on the daytime drama LOVE OF LIFE in 1970.

In a 1990 interview for National Public Radio, Wise told Terri Gross:

“He was a kind of a pseudo-hippie radical type who started riots on campus. In one episode, I remember, I caused the president of the university to have a heart attack.  That’s the way he started.  Six years later, he was a lawyer in the district attorney’s office. You tell me how that could possibly happen, but it did… And in that six and a half years time, I was a cub reporter on the newspaper and I had Marsha Mason as a girlfriend for a while there on the show and I was almost poisoned by Christopher Reeve, who later became Superman… I was a garage mechanic, then a law clerk, and I worked for a judge for a while… In the meantime, my wife ran off with my child. My little child fell through the ice and died. I had an affair with one of my good friend’s wife, and she became pregnant with our illegitimate child… My best friend died of a rare blood disease. I can’t even tell you all of the stuff that happened, but it did. It was a lot of fun.”

Although he played the same guy for his entire six year tenure on the soap opera, Jamie Rawlins’ peripatetic character arc gave Ray Wise an actor’s education not so very different from one he would have gotten in repertory theatre and this diversity set the tone for his nearly forty year career to come.  In his youth, Rise was dark-haired and dark-eyed and this ethnic aspect pigeon-holed him as lower tier badguys and Latin lover types.  He put in his time on episodic television, on CHARLIE’S ANGELS, LOU GRANT, TRAPPER JOHN and BARNABY JONES.  He appeared in eight episodes of the soapy DALLAS in 1982 and that same year could be glimpsed as an actor in a soap opera playing on a TV set in the movie CAT PEOPLE (1982).  An exception to the rule of his typecasting came when he was picked by Wes Craven to play the pre-transformed SWAMP THING (1982).  Wise’s dark-eyed soul and brooding good looks gave the doomed Dr. Alec Holland a dreamy, Byronic affect; he wasn’t just marking time before a good man became a good monster – you actually missed him when villain Louis Jourdan did him dirt.  Yet all of the qualities that Ray Wise brought to bear in SWAMP THING and Disney’s unfairly neglected THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN (a Depression era road picture starring Meredith Salenger and John Cusack, with Wise third-billed as Salenger’s loving but absent father)  to make his characters sympathetic also allowed him to etch a bastard of unalloyed villainy in ROBOCOP (1987)r.  As part of Kurtwood Smith’s badass gang of Motor City miscreants, Wise is entirely hateful as he participates in the butchering of Peter Weller’s nice guy beat cop (which of course sets in motion a Swamp Thing-like transformation).  Wise doesn’t even get any particular business in this extremely graphic and upsetting scene… he just stands there and laughs and you hate him for it.

Of course, Ray Wise is probably best known, worldwide and in perpetuity as the seriously deranged Leland Palmer from David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS.  For Wise, it was just another paycheck but the part morphed into something quite spectacular, quite horrifying and quite unexpectedly poignant during the show’s brief two-season run.  In the first episodes, Leland is transformed by tragedy – the seemingly senseless murder of his high school aged daughter Laura – from a smug and shifty small town fixer to an emotionally crippled parent unable to bear his grief.  And that was just the beginning.

Leland’s journey took him in a direction that viewers just weren’t expecting, as he swallowed his sorrow (his hair turning bone white in the process) to become a crooning glad-hander, popping up all over the fictive timber town of Twin Peaks to charm and disturb with his seemingly endless repertoire of Big Band standards.  And that was just the middle.

The revelation of the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer – big time giant redwood SPOILERS follow and are a part of the clip below, so back off if you’ve let almost 20 years go by without watching this show but are planning to get around to it one of these days – was as much of a surprise to Ray Wise as it was to the viewers.  Advised of Leland’s culpability in TWIN PEAKS‘ big secret by David Lynch during a special, dimly lit meeting, Wise took the ball he was tossed and ran with it.

Going from eye rolling, Manson-like psychopathy to unendurable and in fact terminal remorse within a single scene as the evil spirit inhabiting Leland flees his body and he is left with the horrible awareness of what he has been made to do, Leland’s final moments are both profoundly tragic and unforgettable.  Nowadays, regular characters on network TV shows seem as disposable as tissues but back in 1990 it was still novel to kill off a recurring character; and what a send-off this was.  Courtesy of Ray Wise,  Leland Palmer showed us the flip side of FATHER KNOWS BEST, the inversion of what TV dads were supposed to be.  And yet the character wasn’t a glib piss take on the classic TV paterfamilias, he wasn’t meant to be ironic or cynical… he was just there to help us understand why bad things do happen to good people.

In the almost two decades since TWIN PEAKS, Ray Wise has stomped the terra on his way to play all sorts of characters.  He was a shifty aide-de-camp to Tim Robbins’ slimy banjo-toting neocon presidential candidate in BOB ROBERTS (1992), doomed Mike Todd to Sherilynn Fenn’s Elizabeth Taylor in LIZ: THE ELIZABETH TAYLOR STORY (1995), a vengeful extraterrestrial on a 1998 episode of the syndicated hit series STAR TREK VOYAGER, a tragic victim of Eisenhower era Red-baiting in GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (2005) and the Vice President of the United States for six episodes of the popular TV series 24 in 2006.  Frequently cast by director Victor Salva (POWDER, JEEPERS CREEPERS), Wise was in heroic mode again for JEEPERS CREEPERS 2, playing another aggrieved father, whose son has been taken by the eponymous winged bogey and who has developed an almost Ahab-like mania to destroy it.  A lifelong fan of horror fiction and films, Wise can also be seen in THE KILLING BOX (1993), DEAD END (2003), HELLHOLES (2007), ONE MISSED CALL (2008) and INFESTED (2009).  In 1990, he copped to a passion for the genre with boyish enthusiasm:

“I love to be scared. I love to lay in bed late at night under the covers and shiver a little bit when I read… It feels good to be on the edge of that kind of danger–literary danger–that isn’t life-threatening. It feels pretty good. I enjoy that feeling.”

My kind of guy, Ray Wise.  Even when you can’t see his face, you just know he has to be smiling.