If you don’t know James Woods, well, don’t worry about it. You’re not alone. The sixty-eight-year-old is one of those actors: the ones so good at what they do, you miss their star quality, either because they’ve sunk into a role so deeply it’s obscured their celebrity potential, or because they’ve played fiercely against a bigger billing name — occasionally acting their opponent off the screen. Think Gary Oldman or Ralph Fiennes: Woods is their precursor.
What’s particularly bittersweet about Woods is that the late recognition which finally found Oldman and Fiennes has pretty much evaded him. He’s a household name… but only if you happen to live in the kind of household which devours Hollywood trivia. Early in his career, Woods earned an Oscar nomination for starring in Salvador. Otherwise, he seems to have paved his way playing supporting roles to their maximum hilt. You probably saw him most recently — if you’re inclined toward big, blustery action movies — as the dastardly nemesis to Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx in White House Down. The sexagenarian casually ought-toughs the testosterone levels of both current Hollywood heavyweights, and brings some class to an otherwise ludicrous movie.
It’s not, however, the film you want to watch if you want to see a master at work. For that, there is a back catalogue of intuitive performances from a man who’s more than happy to give you reasons not to like him. Try the one which earned him yet another Academy nod: Ghosts of Mississippi (1996). Or the one which caught him on the cusp of his career: as Barbra Streisand’s weakling beta college boyfriend in 1973’s The Way We Were.
Yet, for Woods’s talent to earnestly shine, the two movies to check out are Martin Scorsese’s seminal Casino (1995) and Sergio Leone’s tragically underrated Once Upon a Time in America (1984); in both, Woods plays opposite the actor in whose shadow he has often stood, Robert de Niro. In Casino, Woods’s feral, slimy turn as Sharon Stone’s waster childhood dream-boy is just the right brand of vacuous charm to aggravate de Niro’s jealousy.
Rewind a decade, and you find Woods giving the performance of his lifetime. Once Upon a Time in America examines the tight but taut friendship between two hoods-turned-prohibition gangsters in the New York projects. As Max, de Niro’s vicious, calculating, ambitiously greedy best friend, Woods manages to refract himself through just enough of the protagonist’s sympathy to give a truly nuanced performance. Initially the movie was even meant to centre on Max, before it shifted to become a vehicle for de Niro, and the intensity Woods pulses through the screen is a rare glimpse into a raucous screen charisma that later directors have sadly failed to capitalise on.
Meanwhile, if you need a good answer for, say, BBC’s Pointless, it can’t hurt to know that Woods was the voice of Hades in Disney’s Hercules. Villainous indeed.
