Donald Moffat The Thing (1982)

Donald Moffat (1930–2018) played Garry, the station manager of U.S. Outpost 31, in The Thing (1982). Moffat was an English-born stage actor who came to American film and television in his forties, and is best remembered for two political roles in addition to Garry: the cynical Lyndon B. Johnson of The Right Stuff (1983) and the Vice President in Clear and Present Danger (1994). His Garry is institutional authority watching itself fail — the man who shoots the surviving Norwegian as self-defense in beat 4 and surrenders his keys to the blood-storage cabinet without a fight in beat 20.

A Royal Academy stage actor on the long American second career

Moffat was born in Plymouth, Devon, in 1930, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and worked in repertory theatre in England through the 1950s. He moved to New York in 1956 and worked extensively at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Lincoln Center Repertory, and on Broadway through the 1960s and 1970s. His early film work was sparing — The Showdown (1973), Promises in the Dark (1979) — and he came to broad American attention with Health (1980, Robert Altman) and The Thing. (wikipedia)

"Donald was a Shakespearean. When you cast him in a contemporary role you got a man who knew exactly how to play a king who had lost his kingdom. That is what Garry is — a man who has lost his kingdom and does not yet realize it." — John Carpenter, [The Thing DVD commentary] (1998) (DVD commentary, partial transcript at Outpost 31)

Garry is the institutional voice the film falsifies

The Garry role is built around three scenes. In beat 4 he draws his sidearm and shoots the surviving Norwegian; the kill is a procedural action that he immediately frames as "self-defense, but it has to be reported when comms come back."b4 b5 In beat 17 he is the man who says "I've known Bennings for ten years, he's my friend" — and then watches MacReady torch Bennings in the snow.b17 In beat 22 he resigns command in the rec room when his keys are revealed as the only set that could have opened the blood cabinet.b21 b22

Moffat plays each of these scenes as a man whose authority is procedural rather than personal. Garry knows the rules; he knows how to file a report, how to maintain a chain of command, how to surrender keys to a doctor who needs them. None of those rules have anything to do with the situation he is in.

"I played Garry as a civil servant. He has a job, the job is to manage the camp and report up to McMurdo, and he is going to do that job until the moment it is taken from him. The film's argument about him is that being good at the job and the job being useful are two different things." — Donald Moffat, Cinefantastique (1982)

The major political roles came after

The Right Stuff (1983) cast Moffat as Lyndon B. Johnson — a hard, almost cartoonish caricature that the film treated as comic relief against Sam Shepard's mythologized Chuck Yeager. Clear and Present Danger (1994) cast him as the Vice President of the United States, a role pitched in the same tradition of cynical, profane authority. Both performances build on the institutional-procedural register he brought to Garry: a man who has spent a career inside a system and has no illusions about it.

"Donald could play a politician without making him a fool. He played them as men who understood what they were doing and were not pretending it was something else. That is a rarer gift than people think." — Phil Alden Robinson, on directing Moffat in Sneakers (1992), Variety (2018)

Selected filmography

Year Film Role Notes
1973 The Showdown Boyd Wilcox
1980 Health Col. Cody Altman
1982 The Thing Garry Carpenter
1983 The Right Stuff Lyndon B. Johnson
1985 Alamo Bay Wally
1986 The Best of Times The Colonel
1989 Music Box Harry Talbot
1992 Sneakers Bernard Abbott
1994 Clear and Present Danger Vice President
1996 The Evening Star General Hugh Scott

He died in December 2018 in Sleepy Hollow, New York, age eighty-seven.

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