Michael Douglas (Coma) Coma
Douglas played the supportive boyfriend in a deliberate gender reversal
Michael Douglas took the role of Dr. Mark Bellows -- Susan Wheeler's boyfriend and fellow surgical resident -- at a transitional moment in his career. He had produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, but his acting career had not yet caught fire. He was between the producing triumph and the leading-man period that would begin with Romancing the Stone (1984) and Fatal Attraction (1987). Coma gave him a relatively undemanding part that quietly inverted genre expectations. (wikipedia)
Ken Anderson identified the structural reversal:
"In a nice reversal of the 'supportive partner' role usually allocated to women in motion picture thrillers, Michael Douglas plays Bujold's allocated-to-the-sidelines boyfriend." — Ken Anderson, Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For (2012)
Stuart Galbraith IV at DVD Talk noted how small the role actually was:
"Michael Douglas, despite co-star billing, really isn't in the picture all that much." — Stuart Galbraith IV, DVD Talk (2012)
Mark Bellows is the film's barometer for institutional pressure
Bellows is not a villain, but he functions as the institution's most effective silencing mechanism. Every time Susan brings him evidence, he responds with the same institutional logic: she is sensitized, the statistics are unremarkable, she should do her job. His dismissals carry more weight than Harris's or Dr. George's because they come from the one person Susan loves and trusts. When a senior physician warns Mark that Susan is endangering his career, Mark accepts the assignment to control her without apparent resistance. His careerism, established in the opening domestic scene, becomes the lever the institution uses against Susan's investigation.
The film's cruelest irony is that Mark delivers Susan to the operating table in beat 34 with genuine concern. He examines her, finds real symptoms produced by Harris's drug, and proceeds with earnest belief that he is helping her. The man who spent the entire film telling Susan to trust the system hands her to the system's killing floor.
His rescue in the final act resolves both stories at once
Mark's destruction of the gas line in beat 38 inverts the film's gender dynamic one final time. The man who dismissed the woman's evidence all film saves her life by acting on it. But the film does not frame this as heroism. Mark is the last person to understand what Susan understood first. His rescue is an act of belated belief, and the film ends with Susan waking up to tell him what he already knows -- the system she exposed is the system that almost killed her.
"A young Michael Douglas bolsters the interest with a good performance of his own." — Vince Leo, Qwipster's Movie Reviews (1997)