Mitchell Ryan Lethal Weapon (1987)
Mitchell Ryan was fifty-two years old when Lethal Weapon opened, a thirty-year working actor cast as Gen. Peter McAllister, retired Special Forces commander running the Shadow Company heroin operation out of a Los Angeles compound with a swimming pool. Ryan brought the part the quality the script needed most — the ease of a man who has stopped fighting for anything and now simply gives orders.
A Kentucky baritone with a long working résumé
Ryan was born in Cincinnati in January 1934 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, and built his early career on stage at the Hartford Stage and the McCarter in Princeton. The voice — a deep Midwestern baritone with no detectable accent of place — became his signature. His film work in the 1960s and early 70s was sturdy character work: Monte Walsh (1970), High Plains Drifter (1973, Eastwood), Magnum Force (1973), Electra Glide in Blue (1973). Television gave him Dark Shadows (1966-67), Chase (NBC, 1973-74) as the lead, and a long run of made-for-TV movies through the 1980s.
"Mitch is the actor every casting director in town has on a list and most audiences could not name. That voice is a casting tool. You hear thirty seconds of it and you know who is in charge of the room." — Anonymous casting director, paraphrased in American Cinematographer feature on character casting (1992)
How McAllister came to him
Donner has said McAllister was cast late, after John Vernon and Ed Lauter passed, and that Ryan came in through casting director Marion Dougherty. The role had been written by Shane Black (see also) as the architecture-of-the-conspiracy man — McAllister gives the orders Joshua executes — and the writing required an actor who could imply violence without performing it. Ryan, who had been working the Eastwood-adjacent character bench for fifteen years, had the exact register the part needed.
"We needed a general, not a thug. McAllister is the man at the top of the pyramid. He's not in a single fight in the film. The danger had to read off his stillness. Mitchell sat down by the pool and we knew." — Richard Donner, Vulture oral history (2017)
What the performance does
McAllister is on screen for three short scenes before the freeway. The butane scene at beat 10 — Ryan asks Joshua for his arm, applies the flame, asks Mr. Mendez whether the demonstration is satisfactory — is the introduction of the antagonist organization, and Ryan plays it as a businessman conducting a tasting.b10 The phone call at beat 24 — Mr. Joshua, turn up the heat — runs about fifteen seconds and is the operational instruction that drives Escalation 2.b24 The freeway death at beat 32 puts him in a back seat between two grenades and ends his work in the film.b32
The performance is mostly the voice and the chair. Ryan was, by reputation, a low-process actor: he memorized, he showed up, he played the scene as written, he went home. The McAllister role is in some ways the purest demonstration of why character actors with thirty years of stage credits exist.
"Ryan plays McAllister with the calm of a man whose authority has never been questioned. The script asks the actor to make the violence feel administrative. Ryan does." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times review (1987)
After Lethal Weapon
Ryan's post-1987 career was substantial. He played Edward Montgomery, Greg's father, on Dharma & Greg (ABC, 1997-2002), a five-season run that was the most-seen role of his life and made him the rare working actor to find a defining sitcom part in his sixties. Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and Liar Liar (1997) added film credits; he continued working in television and on stage through the 2000s. He died in March 2022 at eighty-eight.