The 5: Supporting Actors Who Stole the Film

This Week on the Five:  Supporting Actors Who Stole the Film, The Nineties Edition

 It isn’t always the lead actor who you remember at the end of the day, sometimes even a brief walk on can steal the entire film.  Here are our picks:

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  • Don Cheadle, Devil With the Blue Dress. “You said don’t shoot him, right? Well I didn’t; I choked… If you didn’t want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone with him?” Denzel Washington is a two time Oscar winner and one of the biggest stars of his generation but Cheadle smokes him this brilliant supporting role.
  • Joe Pesci, Goodfellas. “I said, no more shines. Maybe you didn’t hear about it, you’ve been away a long time. They didn’t go up there and tell you. I don’t shine shoes anymore.” Funny how the air leaves this great movie the second Pesci takes one to the back of the head. Almost all focus is gone and it becomes about helicopters and a paranoid coke run. Pesci owned Goodfellas and we compare every role he’s ever done against this one.
  • Michael Madsen, Reservoir Dogs. “Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy, or are you gonna bite?” Such a great cast and such great dialogue but can you imagine Reservoir Dogs without Micheal Madsen as Mr Blond!? Stop lying to yourself, you can’t. Casting Madsen in this role may have set the table for Tarrentino’s upcoming successful career.
  • Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross. “A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing.” David Mamet’s Pulitzer and Tony winning play gets turned into a great screenplay by Mamet with an award winning cast. Mamet thought he needed to add a new character to fill out the screenplay. Blake Mitch and Murray sent him from downtown and he unloads on the all star cast. It’s short screen time and when he leaves you’ll wish the camera went with him.
  • Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper, True Romance. “I’m the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.” Yes it’s cheating to pick a tie to end this list but it would be a bigger cheat to choose one over the other. The ten minutes of dialogue they share is one of if not the best scene in film history. It has tension, humor, sadism, heroism and heartbreak. It would be worth the ticket to go into a theater and only see this scene.
    
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 Send us your picks– sticking with the nineties.