Sometimes, I come at people a bit sideways. The poker tournament in Maverick, for instance, is full of country music stars, and most of the ones I know, I know from other places. Similarly, I am quite sure that Peter Jackson cast Jeffrey Combs in The Frighteners because Combs had starred in Re-Animator, but I’ve never seen Re-Animator and, if I do, I will doubtless see him in it and think, “Oh, that’s the FBI agent from The Frighteners!”

Actually, the first thing I saw him in was Great Performances, a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth that was very influential on me in high school. He played Henry Antrobus, the version of Cain who Wilder plays with in that strange play. It’s a challenging part. Honestly, it’s a bit of a challenging play, the distant cousin of Our Town that you don’t hear about very often. In fact, I prefer it. I saw them both in the same class, and I find bits of The Skin of Our Teeth lingering in my head even now.

He is also the only person in Star Trek history to play two different completely unrelated characters on the same episode—twice, even. (Weyoun and Brunt on the Deep Space Nine episode “Dogs of War” and Weyoun and Officer Mulkahey on “Far Beyond the Stars,” if you’re curious.) He’s also done Voyager and Enterprise. And two of the video games. He’s one of those people who have been hanging around the margins of the series for simply decades now, and I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t turned up in the new stuff yet, for all I’m not much of a fan of the new stuff.

And beyond that, he has a lot of credentials in the world of superheroes. He was on an episode of the ’90s The Flash. He was the Scarecrow on The New Batman Adventures. He was The Question on Justice League Unlimited, meaning he got to deliver my favourite line of the series. (“The plastic tips at the end of shoelaces are called ‘aglets.’ Their true purpose is sinister.”) He’s Samuel Sterns on the animated Avengers. He even did two episodes of Gotham, to get into the live action superhero thing. I’d suggest that Marvel might want to come calling; he could be awfully fun in the MCU.

So yeah, I could talk quite a lot about him without ever getting to his horror credentials, which is just as well, because all I really know of his horror credentials is The Frighteners. That said, he’s also very good in that. He’s mad, and everyone knows it. He’s obsessive and paranoid. He believes he’s saving lives, and instead, he’s making everything so much worse. He’s quite a character, and the movie itself is in my opinion underrated. It’s not one that comes up when Peter Jackson is discussed, and it really should.

The Skin of Our Teeth is on DVD; help me refresh old memories by supporting my Patreon!