Dennis Franz (Body Double) Body Double
Dennis Franz (born October 28, 1944, Maywood, Illinois) played Rubin, the blunt, profane film director in Body Double (1984).
De Palma discovered Franz performing with a Chicago theater company
Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) found Franz at the Organic Theater Company in Chicago and cast him in The Fury (1978) as a hapless police officer. This launched a four-film run: The Fury, Dressed to Kill (1980) as Detective Marino, Blow Out (1981), and Body Double. The trajectory — from a Chicago storefront stage to recurring De Palma player — ran parallel to Franz's work with Robert Altman during the same period (A Wedding, 1978; A Perfect Couple, 1979; Popeye, 1980). De Palma and Altman were essentially sharing Franz as a character actor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (televisionacademy)
Rubin brackets the film with one production
Franz's Rubin directs a single film-within-the-film — Vampire's Kiss — which opens and closes Body Double. The opening shoot is the coffin scene where Jake freezes and gets fired.b1 b11 The closing scene returns to the same production: Jake, rehired ("I'm so glad I fired that other asshole. This part was made for you"), completes the shower take, and the credits play out over the body-double process — a metal bar rolled in, Mindy (a brunette, older, plainly not the blonde actress above the bar) stepping in for the breast shot, and Holly Body in the director's-chair tableau dressed up like a visiting professional, leaning over to tell the swapped-out actress "You're going to get a lot of dates when this comes out."b40 The porn film Jake auditions for in the second act is directed by a different character, Corso.b23 Rubin's bracketing turns the body-double mechanic itself — the bar, the swap, the lower-class working-double dropped in for the shot the lead won't do, the porn star sitting in as the next-door industry's guest — into the film's closing image. The porn-set scene with Corso in the middle is the rhyme that makes the point; Franz doesn't play both halves of it.
The self-portrait dimension is deliberate: Rubin wears a jacket and sports a beard that echo De Palma's own look on set. De Palma acknowledged the joke:
"He got into the De Palma directing outfit and sort of 'did' me." — Brian De Palma, The Frida Cinema (2024)
Franz leaned into the impersonation. When asked about the character's directing style, he pointed straight at his source:
"I pointed to Brian and I said, 'Exactly like that.'" — Dennis Franz, The Frida Cinema (2024)
A demanding horror-film director played by an actor De Palma had already cast in three prior films — it's meta-commentary wrapped inside a character role.
Franz understood his role in De Palma's world
Franz appeared in four De Palma films in total and was self-aware about his function within them:
"There's a comic element to the most serious of his characters." — Dennis Franz, Body Double: The Seduction (2002)
Franz doubles as both a surrogate and a parody of De Palma
The meta-commentary runs deeper than wardrobe. Rubin is the on-screen director within Body Double, and multiple critics have noted that the doubling is the film's thesis delivered through a supporting character. The film-authority.com reviewer observed that Franz "makes for a funny surrogate for the director in various on-set film-within-a-film scenes." (film-authority)
Christy Lemire, in a review for her "Christy by Request" series, identified Franz's Rubin simply as "the demanding director" — a description that captures how the character functions in the film's opening minutes before the audience knows to read him as a De Palma stand-in. (christylemire)
Brett Arnold, in a five-star Letterboxd review, placed Rubin within the film's larger argument about Hollywood as a system of exploitation:
"De Palma violently drags Hitchcock into the sleazy '80s, emphasis on the cock, and uses that mode to comment on the predatory nature of Hollywood and its inherent connection to pornography." — Brett Arnold, Letterboxd (2023)
Rubin is the on-screen authority who delivers the film's closing image: the body-double swap performed as a normal working day on a mainstream horror set. The connection Arnold names is staged not by one director doing both jobs but by a porn performer (Holly Body / Mindy) being absorbed into legitimate production for the shot the lead won't do.
NYPD Blue was nine years away but the persona was already formed
Franz would become a household name as Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue (1993–2005), winning four Emmy Awards for the role. But the blue-collar toughness and the impatience with pretension are already in Rubin. Body Double is a clear early sketch of the persona that would define his career.
Before Body Double, Franz had been building the persona through television: he appeared as various characters on Hill Street Blues (1983–1987), most notably as Lieutenant Norman Buntz in the final two seasons. He also appeared in Scarface (1983) — another De Palma film — in a small role.
Franz built the Sipowicz persona through De Palma and Hill Street Blues
| Year | Film/Show | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | A Wedding | — | Robert Altman ensemble |
| 1980 | Dressed to Kill | Detective Marino | First De Palma collaboration |
| 1983 | Scarface | Ernie | Second De Palma |
| 1983–87 | Hill Street Blues | Lt. Norman Buntz | Recurring/regular |
| 1984 | Body Double | Rubin | Third De Palma |
| 1987 | Beverly Hills Buntz | Lt. Norman Buntz | Spin-off series |
| 1993–2005 | NYPD Blue | Det. Andy Sipowicz | 4× Emmy winner |
Cross-Film Connections
- Also covered in Blow Out (1981) — see Dennis Franz (Blow Out).
Sources
- Dennis Franz — Wikipedia
- Dennis Franz — IMDb
- Body Double Full Cast & Crew — IMDb
- Dennis Franz interview — Television Academy
- Relax, Don't Do It: Body Double — The Frida Cinema (2024)
- Body Double — film-authority.com (2025)
- Christy by Request: Body Double — Christy Lemire (2018)
- Body Double review — geneparmesan, Letterboxd (2023)