Keith David The Thing (1982)
Keith David (born June 4, 1956, in New York City) played Childs, the chief mechanic at U.S. Outpost 31, in The Thing (1982). The Thing was his first major film role, two years out of the Juilliard School. He has played the second protagonist of a John Carpenter film twice — Childs in The Thing and Frank Armitage in They Live (1988) — and has been one of the most-cast voice actors of the last forty years, with a baritone that has been used as the voice of God, the voice of the United States, and the voice of dozens of cartoons and video-game characters.
Juilliard, Shakespeare, and a kennel scene that was almost his
David graduated from the Juilliard School Drama Division in 1979 in the Group 8 cohort that also produced Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams, and Mandy Patinkin. He came to Carpenter's attention through New York theater work — A Soldier's Play and Shakespeare productions at the Public — and was cast in The Thing without a screen test, on the strength of his voice and his stage presence.
"Keith walked into the room. Before he had finished the first sentence I had cast him. The voice — that voice. There was nobody else who sounded like that on a film set." — John Carpenter, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)
David's first scene in the film is the helicopter-arrival sequence in beat 3, where he identifies the language on the fuselage as Norwegian.b3 His most-remembered scene is the kennel torching in beat 12, where MacReady has to yell at him twice — "Damn it, Childs, torch it!" — before he opens up with the flamethrower.b12 David has said the hesitation was deliberate.
"Childs is the only guy in the camp who has thought about what's actually happening. MacReady tells him to torch it; Childs is thinking 'is that a dog or is it not a dog, and what am I about to do.' That hesitation is the character." — Keith David, The Talkhouse (interview, 2017, archived at Talkhouse Podcast)
Childs is the film's second protagonist
The film treats Childs as MacReady's opposite number from the first scene. He is openly skeptical of the saucer story in beat 15 ("voodoo bullshit"),b15 the only man who offers to take command when Garry resigns in beat 22,b22 the man who breaks back into the camp with a flamethrower in beat 28's standoff with MacReady,b28 and the man who walks out of the storm in the final scene.b40 The film's last two-shot is Russell and David framed as equal — neither is the obvious protagonist; either of them could be the Thing.
The reading that the film offers two protagonists is reinforced by the parallel between Childs's and MacReady's costuming: both are visually dressed in the camp's most distinctive outerwear (Childs's hat, MacReady's slouch hat); both are foregrounded against fire in their introductions; both are framed as the last men standing in beat 40. See The Open Ending Debate and The Final Standoff.
They Live and the Carpenter pattern
David's second Carpenter film, They Live (1988), gave him the part — Frank Armitage, the construction worker who reluctantly puts on the sunglasses — that complemented his Childs work. Roddy Piper played the lead; David played the partner whose suspicion of the lead structures the film's central conflict. The two roles together establish a Carpenter pattern: David is cast as the man who is right when the protagonist is being stupid, and who agrees to help anyway.
"I think Carpenter saw something in Keith that I had not seen — that he could play a man who is smarter than the lead and not resentful of the fact, and the audience would still root for the lead." — Roddy Piper, Vice (2014, archived at Vice News)
The voice career
David has been one of the most-cast voice actors of the last four decades. He has been the narrator of every Ken Burns documentary since The War (2007), the voice of dozens of video-game characters (Goliath in Gargoyles, Anansi the Spider in American Dragon: Jake Long, Spawn in Todd McFarlane's Spawn, the Arbiter in Halo 2 and Halo 3, Captain Anderson in the Mass Effect trilogy), and a regular voice in animated television since the early 1990s. The voice that anchored Childs's hesitation in the kennel has become a generational ear-print.
Selected filmography
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1982 | The Thing | Childs | Debut feature; Carpenter |
| 1986 | Platoon | King | Oliver Stone |
| 1988 | They Live | Frank Armitage | Carpenter |
| 1989 | Bird | Buster Franklin | Eastwood |
| 1995 | Dead Presidents | Kirby | Hughes brothers |
| 1996 | The Quick and the Dead | Cantrell | |
| 1996 | Clockers | André the Giant | |
| 1999 | There's Something About Mary | Det. Krevoy | |
| 2003 | Pitch Black | Imam | |
| 2010 | Cloud Atlas | Joe Napier / Kupaka / Lester Rey | |
| 2013 | Greenleaf | Bishop James Greenleaf | TV |