Exclusive: Actor Chris Ellis Talks ‘Apollo 13’ and More

Actor Chris Ellis has had many roles in movies throughout the years, including Apollo 13 (1995), Armageddon (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and so much more. Recently, Ellis took the time to talk with Horror Geek Life about how his experiences in the film industry.

Horror Geek Life: What inspired you to become involved in the film industry?

Chris Ellis: I have a distinct memory of sitting on the floor in rapt wonder while the Mickey Mouse Club TV show and thinking that Annette Funicello and company certainly must live lives of ease and splendor and happiness all because they were ACTORS in HOLLYWOOD. Later on, it was the I Love Lucy TV show. Also, Howard Duff and Ida Lupino played a glamorous Hollywood couple, and I was translated. At the time, my parents had decided – and caused me to recite on command – that I was to become an Episcopal priest. Watching Howard Duff – and thinking of Annette Funicello – I announced that I would not become a priest because I wanted to be an actor.

“You shouldn’t become an actor.”
“Why not?” queried I in innocence.
“Because actors are immoral.”

Deep inside my soul, I heard an angel of earthly delights whispering, “YES!” and my decision became final.

Horror Geek Life: What was your first role ever?

Chris Ellis: The first theatrical role for which I ever got hard cash was in a 1974 Buford Pusser movie, but though I got paid, the part was cut from the film before we shot it. The first role I ever got paid for, in fact, was in a 1981 TV movie called Rascals And Robbers: Tom and Huck.

In that movie, I played a clown in one brief scene with Anthony Zerbe and 12-year-old Cynthia Nixon. Tom Sawyer in that movie was played by a youthful, obstreperous Anthony Michael Hall, whose death in slow agony, I then gladly would have been delighted to witness. Zerbe was amiable and charming and a pleasure to work with.

Horror Geek Life: How did that impact your career?

Chris Ellis: The impact of that first role was a hardened resolve to continue pursuing that sort of work. At that time, I frequently moved back and forth between my hometown of Memphis and my adopted town of NYC. I had always been a part of the local theater community and found it a matter of no small wonder that almost no person I knew in those circles ever pursued gainful employment as a professional film/TV actor. It puzzled me that I never saw the local theater people at those rare auditions for local film work. It still puzzles me.

Horror Geek Life: You’ve often played some form of an officer, why is that?

Chris Ellis: Despite a few early jobs, I spent most of the 1980s living in bone-grinding poverty and professional frustration in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. When I began working with a theatrical agent in New York he said to me, “Your Mercurio-playing days have come and gone. Your hairline is going, and your waistline is growing. Cut out that mid-Atlantic theatrical accent. That’s for the birds. You are not a theater actor working at some stock company in Ohio, you are a Tennessee good ol’ boy who is going to work steadily in film and television as long as you sell yourself as just that.”

My fourth audition with him was for the Tom Cruise race car movie Days Of Thunder, in which for fifteen weeks I played a southern good ol’ boy (without one word of dialogue), and though I frequently have tried to break that mold for greater career opportunities, the southern good ol’ boy has kept me off the streets throughout a consistent if undistinguished career for a quarter century. Probably starting with the movie Apollo 13, I began being cast as one kind of authority figure or another, usually a cop of some stripe, and that has led my way ever since.

Horror Geek Life: What has been your favorite acting role so far?

Chris Ellis: My all-time favorite role (in which I played a southern good o’ boy cop) was in a dreadfully unfinished Keanu Reeves/James Spader movie called The Watcher. What I liked about it so much is that the writer was a New York Jew who asked me to help him flesh out the character with dialogue suggestions, so I wrote almost every word of every speech I had in that movie.

Alternatively, I might have said that my favorite role was that of Deke Slayton in Apollo 13 because that movie, more than any other, revved up my career prospects, and everyone working on that movie had the conviction while shooting it that it was going to be Ron Howard’s best movie ever (still is, I think), and that it would be a significant movie that would have a significant effect on all of our careers (it did).

Horror Geek Life: That’s a shame to hear that it went unfinished. What has been your favorite movie you were involved with in general despite the acting part?

Chris Ellis: Of all the movies I have worked on, my favorite, far and away, is Apollo 13. I believe it is a great movie, I did not embarrass myself in it (overmuch), and I had a sizable role in it.

Horror Geek Life: Out of all the actors you’ve worked with, who has been your favorite?

Chris Ellis: Of all the people I have worked for or with, my favorites are Mark Harmon, the most gracious person in the business. When Harmon ascends into heaven, that position will be occupied by Timothy Oliphant. Both those actors, whom I met while doing episodes, respectively, of NCIS and Justified, are known and acknowledged to be generous and hospitable with newcomers onto the set. Anyone in Los Angeles who has worked with either of these two men will recite the same answer without pausing to think about it.

Again, there is an alternate reply, and that would be Tom Hanks and Billy Bob Thornton. Both these actors were very generous and very gracious and gave me work on their own projects after we had met while working on others. Maybe I should put them first.

Horror Geek Life: Are there any actors/directors that you haven’t worked with yet, but would like to work with if given the chance?

Chris Ellis: The director I would like to work with is any person who respects the craft of acting enough to demand that his or her cast members get paid right. In the time of my career, I have seen actor salaries become concentrated in the leads and in a few celebrities’ supporting roles; everyone else is expected to work at entry-level wages.

You might think that a celebrity who gets $50-100 million dollars for six months of work might urge producers to share the wealth, but increasingly it seems that nobody cares about the money.

Horror Geek Life: Beyond acting, what are your hobbies?

Chris Ellis: What I do between phone calls from my agent is to create daily caricatures and to turn wooden bowls on a lathe in the garage. I’m a pretty good wood-turner, but my work in caricature is about as good as it gets, and I wish there was a way to make a living in that line of work. Maybe there is, but I have not found it. If, in the gentle art of caricature, I could continue providing for Mrs. Ellis’ whims and caprices (and she has a whim of iron), I would abandon all other employments but don’t tell my agent I said that.

Horror Geek Life: If you hadn’t been an actor, what else could you have seen as a potential career?

Chris Ellis: Given that I cannot seem to make a living with my frivolous doodles, I must say that the only alternative career in which I could have found happiness would have been as a Professor of Miscellany at a prestigious New England college in a small town with colorful autumn leaves gladdening the heart every October.

A few years ago, I happened to be strolling around the perimeter of the Harvard Yard in Cambridge and beheld with happiness young intellectuals in sidewalk coffee shops blowing cigarette smoke in each other’s faces and talking about existentialism — just like they did while I was in college. Some things never change, and I could have been happy warping young minds with poetry, except that, at my reckoning, it is just about as easy to provide whims and caprices in the ivory towers of Academe as at the drawing table.

Horror Geek Life: Movies have been a huge part of your life, but what is your all-time favorite movie?

Chris Ellis: So, I continue these travails of standing on a spot someone else has lit, wearing clothing someone else has picked out, and reading words that someone else has written. It ain’t a bad way to make a living, and it keeps me in the same line – and occasionally in the very same sound stage –  that has produced some of the world’s greatest artistic achievements — if you grant, as I do, that movies can attain the sublime.

For me, the all-time greatest movies, which playfully gambol around each other for an order of prestige, are The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, and Godfather I. The Maltese Falcon is so engaging that its flaws (Bogie clapping his hands is derisive laughter) are not only forgivable but clearly demonstrable. Chinatown tells a great story with an excellent cast (in the days before Jack Nicholson began phoning it in) and with cinematic and directorial artistry non-pareil. Godfather I, like Maltese Falcon, has only one shot that should have been corrected in production (when Robert Duvall mimes counting out money when describing to Sonny Corleone that McCloskey is on the take for big money). Nevertheless, it is the most completely perfect movie I have paid close attention to. Every frame is a postcard, the cast is universally excellent, the screenplay is excellent, direction, art direction, story – everything all but platonically ideal.

However, just under that holy trinity, I readily consider My Cousin Vinny to have legs that will keep it perennially favorable as long as there is home video consumption. In that movie, the two main characters appear to love each other; you cannot write or direct that. Either it happens, or it doesn’t. In that movie, it does. Also, in that movie, every character (except the one in the pool hall played by some scoundrel) is consummately decent and eventually cooperates with the defense in that murder trial. In how many movies can that be said?