Cast and Characters (Body Heat) Body Heat (1981)
Principal Cast
Ned Racine — William Hurt
A second-rate Miranda Beach lawyer with a corner-cutting practice — bankruptcy filings, a doctor-shopping personal-injury hustle, an old malpractice case (Gourson) that cost him a license fight, and a judge (Costanza) who has lost patience with him. Hurt plays Ned at the exact register the part requires: a man whose self-image as the smart party at the table is the lever the film uses to dismantle him. He is competent enough at small-town fraud to think he can scale to murder, and the film's argument is that he cannot. Hurt was a stage actor coming off Altered States (1980); Body Heat was his second feature and the role that announced him as a leading man. See William Hurt.
Matty Walker — Kathleen Turner
The wife of a wealthy South Florida businessman. Turner, in her film debut, plays Matty in the lower register — a voice an octave below the casting bracket Hollywood had been using, a stillness that lets the film place the camera on her face for long beats and trust the audience to read what it wants there. The role required an actress whose every line might be either the truth or its perfect counterfeit; Turner delivered both at once, in the same line, on first take. The character is a long-running identity con — a woman who has been Matty Tyler Walker for three years, who was once Mary Ann Simpson, who learned wills from a lawyer in Chicago and selected Ned a year before they met. See Kathleen Turner and Kathleen Turner's Debut.
Edmund Walker — Richard Crenna
Matty's husband, a Miami real-estate operator with land at the shore (The Breakers) and an unspecified "they" he answers to. Crenna plays Edmund as friendly, voluble, direct — and dangerous, in a way Ned cannot read. At the Pinehaven restaurant Edmund tells Ned, in plain language, that he would kill any guy he caught with his wife, and segues into a story about people who want to get rich quick but aren't willing "to do what's necessary. Whatever is necessary."b16 The line is the film's structural rhyme: it returns ninety minutes later in Ned's mouth, in a prison library, finally heard. See Richard Crenna.
Peter Lowenstein — Ted Danson
The prosecutor's-office friend who needles Ned at Stella's diner, dances tap steps in the courthouse hall, and ends the film as the assistant state attorney building the case against him. Danson, then known mostly for soap opera work and not yet cast in Cheers (1982), plays Lowenstein with an off-center comic energy that gives the film some of its lightness — and that makes the park-bench scene where he formally lays out the prosecution's evidence land harder. See Ted Danson.
Det. Oscar Grace — J.A. Preston
The investigating detective, Lowenstein's partner at the diner table and the only person in the film who likes Ned and tries to warn him off. Preston plays Grace as patient, watchful, and finally exhausted — the man who hears Ned's prison-library reconstruction and does not believe it because the money cannot be found. Grace's parting line — "Is that what you've been waiting for?" — is the film's structural goodbye. See J.A. Preston.
Teddy Lewis — Mickey Rourke
A young arsonist Ned has previously represented, who runs a workshop building incendiary devices. Rourke, in his fourth film and first role of any size, delivers what many critics consider the film's most memorable supporting performance: the device walkthrough that turns into a warning. Rourke plays Teddy with an unexpected affection for Ned — the small-time professional warning the small-time amateur in the only language the amateur cannot bullshit. See Mickey Rourke.
Supporting Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Kim Zimmer | Mary Ann Simpson |
| Jane Hallaren | Stella |
| Lanna Saunders | Roz Kraft |
| Carola McGuinness | Heather Kraft |
| Michael Ryan | Miles Hardin |
| Larry Marko | Judge Costanza |
| Lynn Hallowell | Mrs. Singer |
| Thom Sharp | Michael Glenn |
Kasdan assembled a cast of either-debutantes-or-second-features
The Body Heat cast is striking for how many of its members were either making their film debut or working at the start of major careers. Kathleen Turner was an unknown stage and soap actress (The Doctors, 1978–82) who had never appeared in a feature film. Mickey Rourke had four small credits and no leading-man identity yet. Ted Danson was a few months from being cast as Sam Malone on Cheers. Even William Hurt, fresh off the success of Ken Russell's Altered States, was technically in his second feature. Richard Crenna and J.A. Preston were the seasoned hands; everyone else was being asked to land a role at a register they had not yet been tested at.
That casting discipline came partly from Kasdan's structural intuition and partly from constraint. Body Heat was a relatively low-budget production with a first-time director, and the studio (the Ladd Company, distributing through Warner Bros.) was not interested in expensive star packages. What the budget enforced — unknowns, debuts, hungry second-feature actors — turned out to be exactly what the material wanted. A bigger Matty Walker would have telegraphed the con; a bigger Ned Racine would have looked stupid for falling for it. The casting is the structural argument made in flesh.