I have long assumed that the reason Sam Elliott plays so many bikers and cowboys was that he knows he looks better with facial hair than without. And these days, most roles for older men with impressive facial hair are bikers and cowboys, with the odd Civil War general thrown in. It turns out, though, that the main reason he plays a lot of bikers and cowboys is that people expect Sam Elliott to play bikers and cowboys, and he’d actually rather like to play a wider variety of roles and isn’t offered them. Which is kind of disappointing.

In the year I was born, he was declared a promising new actor. He’s worked steadily since then, playing a lot of bikers and cowboys and Civil War generals. Several historical figures—Brigadier General John Buford, Virgil Earp, Sam Houston. Evel Knievel, once. In fiction, Thunderbolt Ross and a Marlboro Man. Basically, it seems to me that Elliott has inhabited a certain kind of laconic rugged masculinity, a kind that generally has truly impressive facial hair. Though there’s also a tenderness, the sort of thing where he’ll comfort his wife while being treated for a gunshot wound.

I do not, as I’ve mentioned before, particularly care for The Big Lebowski, but who else would you cast as The Stranger? The characters Sam Elliott plays have a hint of wry humour—and unlike Clint Eastwood, it’s a lot harder to picture a Sam Elliott character as mean for the sake of mean. Even Thunderbolt Ross isn’t wrong to be concerned about Bruce Banner, though he handles it badly and possibly takes it too far. Certainly he makes a bad situation worse. However, he comes to it from a place of love, or at least he thinks he does.

He does no little voicework, too, because of how distinctive his voice is. He gets selected for commercials where you need that classic gruff Americana; he’s one of several Western-style actors who’ve voiced commercials informing us that beef is what’s for dinner, and no wonder. He does commercials for trucks and trains. And beer. Smokey Bear. And Butch the T-rex in The Good Dinosaur, which I watched this weekend and found pleasant enough. The character was both rough and kindly, dispensing solid wisdom. Who else to cast but Sam Elliott?

It’s hard to imagine him as young; he’s somewhere in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though nowhere prominent enough for him to have come to the notice of his future wife, Katharine Ross; they wouldn’t actually meet for several years. But when I think of him, I think of grey hair and a kindly twinkle to squinted eyes. Someone who’ll go the extra mile to protect innocents. To be perfectly honest, I know basically nothing about him as a person. But he’s done many variants on the character. He’s also quite firm on the fact that he’ll be doing quite a lot more; his career is nowhere near done yet.