It wouldn’t seem particularly in-character for Shea Whigham to have a big year, even if he is currently co-starring in a big Netflix hit. Whigham is one of our great that-guy character actors, who broke out after a decade of smallish parts by playing Eli Thompson, the malcontent brother of Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Befitting a show that was itself sometimes seen as kind of a poor relation to The Sopranos (though it was quite good in its own right!), Eli seethes and rages about his various poor lots and misadventures, and Whigham established himself as a premier player of losers both born and self-elected. He’s in too much stuff to always play the exact same guy, but he’s carved out a real niche as someone flummoxed, sometimes sympathetically and sometimes not, by the slicker operators around him – especially in the movies, where he’s often bedeviled by handsome, put-together stars like Tom Cruise, Paul Walker, Leonardo DiCaprio, or King Kong, among others.
In television, it’s not always so simple. Boardwalk has afforded him the opportunity to expand his work beyond single-episode guest shots into recurring and regular roles with more depth and range than the average blockbuster bit part. In his new hit American Primeval, for example, he plays real-life pioneer Jim Bridger, founder of an outpost in 1857 Utah, and he’s more of a weathered pragmatist attempting to negotiate the wildness of the American West. But his success on TV shows with cinematic scope winds up emphasizing the degree to which he feels bonded to the movies, where there will always be a place for That Guy. Here, then, is a chronological journey through the Essential Shea Whigham Cinema.
Whigham plays a lot of cops, agents, and other law-enforcement functionaries, something Boardwalk had fun with by assigning him to the beat of a criminal’s crooked sheriff brother right off the bat. But before that HBO series, Whigham may have been most recognizable as Agent Michael Stasiak, a coworker of Brian (Paul Walker), back when he was still (somewhat inexplicably) allowed in the FBI. True to series fashion, Stasiak has since returned, most notably in Fast & Furious 6, when Brian needs his help to go undercover in a prison. But that movie has a lot of moving parts, and while he doesn’t get that much screen time in the feds-centric fourth film, he fits in better with the (relatively) more grounded story. Whigham does the character-actor grunt-work of enlivening some of the material in between action set pieces, forming a natural contentiousness with Walker’s golden-boy-gone-bad character.
At the end of 2013, David O. Russell released a star-studded, multiple-narrator crime movie that was frequently compared to Scorsese, just as Scorsese released his own star-studded crime movie with its more damning take on the economics of American greed and ambition. In truth, Russell’s movie is as true to his own style as anything else he’s made, veering into interpersonal farce where Scorsese’s movie sprawls with lurid detail. In other words, they’re both terrific – and the true link between them isn’t Marty, but Shea, the only actor who appears in both. He’s not necessarily crucial in either; in Wolf, he’s the boat captain who memorably tells DiCaprio that they might “hit some chop” on their hastily planned journey, while Hustle casts him as a gateway semi-criminal who inadvertently helps bring Camden mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner) into a sting set up by an FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) and a pair of con artists (Christian Bale, Amy Adams). Movies this freewheeling need a steady supply of oddballs and tangents to keep the narratives winding and twisting; Whigham provides that twice in close proximity without repeating himself.
Hey, look at our man Shea, getting to play an astronaut for once! At least for a little while, anyway. Whigham plays Gus Grissom, doomed participant in the Apollo 1 mission, in Damien Chazelle’s rigorous and affecting space-program drama. He’s just one dude in a whole NASA’s worth of them (Ryan Gosling, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Christopher Abbott, Ethan Embry) – and in a cast like this, you need to make an impression quickly and succinctly, something Whigham is especially good at, even when he’s not an alcoholic criminal and/or dad.
The coming-of-age adventure movie Low Tide was barely released in theaters and barely seen on VOD back in 2019. It’s too bad that it wasn’t able to leverage its A24 branding into a wider audience, because it’s something of a gem, following a group of teenage boys who live at the New Jersey shore and discover a possible hidden treasure on a nearby island. Whigham once again plays a supporting part as, yep, a cop. But he’s also ideally cast as the movie’s only real adult figure, who knows the local boys, their families, and their particular brands of trouble all too well: A strong enough actor to suggest a lot with relatively scant screen time, and enough of a movie-movie presence to lend Low Tide some pulpy credibility.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this offbeat neo-noir is that it keeps Shea in Whigham Mode despite him playing a rare leading role. Lake George came and went with little fanfare this past December, and it’s not as “good” a “movie” as any number of other projects featuring Whigham, like, say, Silver Linings Playbook, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Non-Stop, or the most recent Mission: Impossible. (Seriously, dude gets around.) What Lake George has going for it is Whigham paired with Carrie Coon, as a reluctant hit man and his even-more-reluctant target. Ex-con Don (Whigham) is expected to settle a debt with a criminal by killing his tempestuous girlfriend Phyllis (Coon), only to form a hesitant, potentially dangerous partnership with her instead. The mix of crime-movie tension and irreverent quirk isn’t always palatable, but Whigham makes a predictably engaging sad-sack ex-criminal hero in a way that a more traditional leading man wouldn’t – namely, that you actually believe this guy might be in danger of getting killed by his bosses, or his uneasy partner, or pretty much anyone.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
