James Remar The Warriors (1979)
James Remar (born December 31, 1953, Boston, Massachusetts) played Ajax in The Warriors (1979). The role launched a career that has spanned more than four decades and over two hundred film and television credits, almost all of them in the character-actor register the Ajax performance established.
Ajax is the film's diagnostic case
Remar plays Ajax as the warrior-tribe instinct surviving inside the post-midpoint platoon, dramatized as a single member who cannot be retrained. He challenges Swan (Michael Beck) at the chain-link fence ("Why him? Why not me?"), throws the Molotov at the Orphans (force where the platoon would have used the route), and breaks off from formation to chase a woman on a park bench who turns out to be an undercover policewoman. The performance has to be loud enough to register against the rest of the gang and human enough that the audience does not write Ajax off as comic relief.
"Ajax is the guy who's always right that the situation should be handled by force. It's just that the situation has changed and force isn't right anymore." — James Remar, The Hollywood Reporter (45th-anniversary retrospective, 2024)
Remar's specific gift on the film is making Ajax legible without making him stupid. The character is a fighter who has read the room wrong, not a brute who can't read at all.
A four-decade character-actor career
Remar has worked continuously since 1979 in roles that draw on the menace and physicality the Ajax part announced.
| Year | Project | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1979 | The Warriors | Ajax |
| 1980 | Cruising | DaVinci |
| 1982 | 48 Hrs. | Ganz (the antagonist) |
| 1984 | The Cotton Club | Dutch Schultz |
| 1985 | The Clan of the Cave Bear | Creb |
| 1989 | Drugstore Cowboy | Gentry |
| 1996 | The Phantom | Quill |
| 1997 | Boogie Nights | Buck Swope's customer (uncredited cameo per IMDb) |
| 1998–2004 | Sex and the City (TV) | Richard Wright (recurring) |
| 2002–2003 | RoboCop: Prime Directives (TV) | Sgt. John T. Cable |
| 2006–2013 | Dexter (TV) | Harry Morgan (regular) |
| 2010 | The Sorcerer's Apprentice | Various |
| 2013– | Voice work — Mortal Kombat franchise | Jax (multiple games) |
| 2017 | The Last Sharknado: It's About Time | Various |
| 2019 | Once Upon a Time in Hollywood | Cameo |
| 2020s | Black Lightning (TV), We Own This City (TV) | Recurring |
The runs on Sex and the City (as Samantha's older lover Richard Wright) and Dexter (as Dexter's ghost-father Harry Morgan) are the highest-profile of his television work. The Dexter role in particular gave Remar the longest single-character run of his career — eight seasons of regular appearances as the moral voice in Dexter's head.
The 48 Hrs. reunion with Walter Hill
Three years after The Warriors, Remar appeared in Walter Hill's (in The Warriors) 48 Hrs. (1982) as Albert Ganz — the cop-killing fugitive whose pursuit drives the film. The reunion with Hill cast Remar against type as a more controlled and more frightening figure than Ajax: where Ajax was loud and reactive, Ganz is quiet and methodical. The dyad shows the range Hill saw in Remar early.