Pretty much every working auteur has a recurring roster of actors that can deliver their particular brand of dialogue or play their kind of character with gusto. Martin Scorsese keeps coming back to Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Quentin Tarantino keeps coming back to Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz. Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular company of actors includes such heavy-hitting talent as Daniel Day-Lewis, Julianne Moore, Joaquin Phoenix, and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Anderson has also been working with Step Brothers star John C. Reilly since the beginning of his filmmaking career.
Reilly played one of the lead roles in Anderson’s debut feature, Hard Eight (also known as Sydney), and returned for prominent supporting roles in the director’s next two films, Boogie Nights and Magnolia. After that, Reilly took a P.T.A. sabbatical for a couple of decades, but the two recently rekindled their collaboration – albeit briefly – with a cameo appearance in Anderson’s latest opus, Licorice Pizza.
Fred Gwynne (Licorice Pizza)
Anderson’s latest masterpiece, Licorice Pizza, has received universal praise from critics. The writer-director returned to the familiar settings of the 1970s and his hometown, the San Fernando Valley, for what feels like his most personal, deeply engaging film to date. The leads of the film are Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim, who each give impeccably naturalistic performances despite their shared lack of acting experience. Reilly makes an unmistakable cameo appearance somewhere in the middle.
It was great to see Reilly in an Anderson movie again, even if it was just a brief appearance during the long tracking shot at the expo where Gary debuts his waterbed business. Like Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters and Sean Penn as Jack Holden (based on William Holden), Reilly is one of the Licorice Pizza actors who plays a real-life figure. Reilly plays Munsters star Fred Gwynne, making an appearance at the expo in costume as Herman Munster.
John Finnegan (Hard Eight)
The movie that put Anderson on the map was Boogie Nights, but that was his second feature as a director. He’d previously helmed the little-seen Hard Eight – also known by Anderson’s preferred title, Sydney – as his low-budget directorial debut. It stars Philip Baker Hall as the sometime title character, Sydney, a veteran gambler who takes a young drifter under his wing.
Reilly plays the drifter, John Finnegan, whose mentor-mentee dynamic with Sydney quickly becomes toxic and dysfunctional. Sydney and John became the first of many twisted father-son relationships in Anderson’s filmography (later joined by There Will Be Blood’s Daniel and H.W. Plainview and The Master’s Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd). Thanks to their powerful on-screen chemistry, Hall and Reilly stuck the landing with this trope-maker.
Officer Jim Kurring (Magnolia)
Anderson’s third film, Magnolia, is one of his most controversial works. Some critics declared it to be a masterpiece, while others dismissed it. The movie is a Robert Altman-style “hyperlink” movie following the interconnected antics of a sprawling ensemble of characters in the Valley. The star-studded cast includes such screen legends as Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, and Alfred Molina. Of course, Reilly is also in tow (alongside a handful of other Anderson regulars, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, and his Hard Eight co-star Philip Baker Hall).
Reilly plays Officer Jim Kurring, one of the movie’s more comedic characters. Jim is a bumbling cop who films himself as he drives around town in his squad car, but he also turns out to have a huge heart. Anderson told the Guardian that Jim was based on a concept he’d developed with Reilly a few years before they made Magnolia: “Reilly came up with most of his character a couple of summers ago, after he grew a mustache for fun. He started to work up this not very smart cop character and we did a sort of take-off on Cops with me chasing him around the streets with a video camera. We did several – Jennifer Jason Leigh was in one – and some of the Reilly character’s lines come from that far back.”
The director went on to explain that, while Reilly provided the concept for the character, he added a romantic element to develop that comedic persona into a more dramatic figure: “That’s a case of an actor really bringing something in, because John basically co-created the character. But I always try to sneak a little bit of them in there, their little traits that I know. I also wanted to make John a romantic lead, because I’ve always seen him that way.”
Reed Rothchild (Boogie Nights)
While the more cerebral storytelling of There Will Be Blood and The Master has earned Anderson new levels of critical acclaim, there’s a case to be made that Boogie Nights is still his greatest movie – or, certainly, his most wildly entertaining work. With the rapid-paced style of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Anderson captured the delirious chaos of the Golden Age of Porn. This epic is framed through Dirk Diggler’s harrowing journey from busboy to pornstar to down-and-out drug addict.
Reilly gives a crucial supporting turn as Reed Rothchild, Dirk’s best friend and creative partner. With this role, Anderson made great use of Reilly’s comedic talents as well as his dramatic capabilities. They get hooked on cocaine together, co-create a series of action movie porn parodies, and ultimately cause their own downfall by flying too close to the sun.
