The quiet man

A character actor sings the praises of doing as little as possible onscreen.

Richard Jenkins is the quintessential “Hey! It’s that guy!” actor. You know him. You’ve seen him in a bunch of stuff. What was his name again? He’s the pater familias undertaker who buys the farm at the beginning of Six Feet Under. He’s the ATF agent who has an acid trip in Flirting With Disaster. With his earnest face and a voice that blends silk and old wood, he’s the go-to guy when you want sober, quiet gravitas with a hint of something a bit more unconventional going on beneath the surface.

That description applies not just to the characters he plays, but to Jenkins himself. Born and raised in DeKalb and a graduate of Illinois Weslyan, Jenkins exudes a quiet aura of, well, averageness. In the hotel lounge where we caught up with him last month, he easily could have passed for a CPA in town for a convention, except that people kept sneaking glances at him, trying to place this balding guy in his 50s with the button-down shirt and the tortoiseshell glasses.

In the newest film from The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy, The Visitor, Jenkins delivers another of his trademark still-waters-run-deep performances, but this time he’s the lead. Walter Vale is a lonely professor of global economics at a college in Connecticut. On a trip to New York City for an academic conference, Walter gets a practical lesson in his topic of study when he finds two illegal immigrants living in an apartment he owns in the city. When Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) gets ensnared in the web of Homeland Security, Walter has to move outside his comfort zone.

What’s most striking about Jenkins’s performance is the way he uses stillness to draw in the viewer. Some of the best scenes in the film involve Walter doing something simple, like making a meal or sitting down at a piano to practice. Without much visible expression or gesture, Jenkins can elevate these things into high drama.

When we ask Jenkins about stillness as an actor’s tool, he’s eager to talk about the craft. “It comes a little bit with age,” he explains. “It’s trusting yourself enough to not think you have to—what we call, show and tell. You just live the life onscreen as you would offscreen and see what happens.” He elaborates by musing on his younger days, when he mostly worked in the theater. “At one point I was really hungry. You think ‘the harder I do it, the more I work it, it’s going to be good, good, good.’ I come offstage and I’m sweating and my voice is hoarse; it must have been great because I worked hard. But in acting it’s like the opposite of the work ethic."

The Visitor runs a genuine risk of being labeled as just another film in which a middle-class white person has an encounter with ethnic “others” who expand his personal horizons. When we ask Jenkins about this, he readily acknowledges that it was a concern for McCarthy and for him. “We’re both white guys. You can’t get past that. I think the film is speaking to people who haven’t stepped in other shoes, who haven’t looked at something from a different angle, which is probably like us. It’s not a matter of—nothing is resolved. We don’t really know about these people. We don’t really know them. We just see them as some big thing and I think Tom just wanted this to be two cultures coming together that probably wouldn’t have in other circumstances. But yes, it was something difficult.”

One aspect of the film that was surprisingly easy for Jenkins was Walter’s growing interest in drumming, something he picks up from Tarek. “I played the drums when I was younger,” notes Jenkins. “But that was something Tom didn’t know. I played the drums for a few years. I was never good. My son is a drummer and he’s an amazing drummer. But I was never a natural drummer. I thought, yes, finally something paid off that I did as a kid.”

McCarthy took advantage of Jenkins’s ability to blend into the background for the last scene of The Visitor, in which Walter drums on a subway platform. They shot the scene with a small camera in a New York station from the opposite platform, and many of the people who pass by are unaware that they are in a film. They look at Jenkins and see just another subway musician. When we point out that this fits perfectly with his career as “that guy,” Jenkins smiles broadly. “Right. ‘What have I seen you in?’ ”

The Visitor opens Friday.

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