He performs my favorite "crazed destruction" scene in that movie.
"Nobody gets in or out of here! NOBODY! You guys think I'm crazy?! Well, that's fine! Most of you don't know what's going on around here, but I'm damn well sure some of you do! You think that thing wanted to be an animal?! No dog's gonna make it a thousand miles to the coast! You don't understand! That thing wanted to be US! A cell gets out, and it'll imitate everything on the face of the Earth! AND NOTHING CAN STOP IT!"
Postmaster General role in Seinfeld, which parodied his role in Absence of Malice. The Seinfeld role was played for laughs but there was a little bit of a dark edge to it, in a funny way.
Another example of an actor who routinely played much older characters is Clive Dunn, who most notably at age 48 played the elderly Lance Corporal Jones in the UK sitcom Dad's Army [0]
For a similar experience, watch Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969). Philip Baker Hall was only thirty-seven when he acted in that film, but he already looks like the old man whom people would recognize from the more acclaimed roles he started getting in his fifties and sixties.
I recalled immediately this interview with Ron Howard on the Director’s Cut podcast.
The segment starts around 20:30 to 34:00 with a discussion of directing stars Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, and Brian Dennehy in Cocoon (1985) and their different acting styles—particularly Don and Wilford.
Amusingly I'm watching this right now. The whole movie is just awful, but in that wonderful awfulness of the mid 90s, where slow, repetitive pans of Van Damme's face seemed "cool". I just love it.
Directed by John Woo, with Jean Claude Van Damme doing his strange Cajun(?) accent, and Lance Henriksen looking like he just stepped off the set of Aliens.
Oh I know, but I think they were trying to get him to do some sort of Cajun accent for the movie and it just turned out really strangely, in a good way.
