Jake Busey The Frighteners (1996)
Jake Busey was twenty-four when The Frighteners opened, with two minor credits behind him and a face that the camera read as immediately threatening — high forehead, prominent teeth, broad smile, his father Gary Busey's bone structure pushed to a more cartoonish register. Johnny Charles Bartlett was his breakout supporting role and a near-perfect calling card. Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven, 1997) followed within a year. Busey has spent his subsequent career playing variations on the same threatening grin.
Gary Busey's son
Busey was born in 1971 in Los Angeles, the son of actor Gary Busey (The Buddy Holly Story, Lethal Weapon) and Judy Helkenberg. He grew up on his father's sets and made his on-screen debut at age three in The Gumball Rally (1976), uncredited. His first credited role was Straight Time (1978) as Gary Busey's son in a film where Gary played a parolee — a piece of casting that would recur. He took a long break for adolescence and returned in PCU (1994) and S.F.W. (1994) before Peter Jackson cast him in The Frighteners.
"I auditioned with the documentary monologue — 'Got me a score of twelve, sir. That's one more than Starkweather.' Peter laughed for the whole audition. I knew I had it before I left the room." — Jake Busey, Bloody Disgusting (2018)
Bartlett as a 1996 take on the 1960s spree-killer archetype
Bartlett is modeled on Charles Starkweather — the 1958 Nebraska spree killer whose 1957–1958 spree with fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate inspired Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973), the Springsteen album Nebraska (1982), and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994).b5 The film's documentary segment names the comparison explicitly — Bartlett's twelve-victim count is "one more than Starkweather" — and the climax visions name it again — "Eleven. That's the same as Starkweather's."b32
Busey plays the role on the register of giddy unfazed conviction. Bartlett does not appear haunted by what he has done; he appears delighted by it. The 1964 visions in the sanatorium corridor — Busey shooting an orderly mid-stride, asking Patty for the score, hearing "Eleven" with a grin — are some of the most disturbing moments in the film because the affect is so completely wrong for the action.
"Busey understood that the most unsettling thing about a spree killer is the cheerfulness. He played Bartlett like a kid winning a video game. The kills are happening at the speed of his laughter. That is much harder to watch than any brooding villain." — Maitland McDonagh, Time Out New York (1996)
After The Frighteners
Starship Troopers (1997) cast Busey as Ace Levy, one of the squad's senior members. The role traded on the same threatening grin in a more affable register. Enemy of the State (1998), Contact (1997, as the suicide bomber Joseph), and Identity (2003) followed. Busey has worked steadily across genre cinema and television since — most recently a recurring role on The Predator (2018) opposite his father, and the streaming series Stranger Things 2 (2017) as Dr. Brenner's deputy.
His face has aged into a kind of indelible character-actor specificity. He is the working actor's working actor: hundreds of credits, no breakout lead, an indisputable presence whenever he appears.
"Jake Busey is the kind of actor who comes onscreen and the temperature in the room drops three degrees. You don't have to do anything else with him. The screen has registered a threat." — April Wolfe, LA Weekly (2019)