R. Lee Ermey The Frighteners (1996)
R. Lee Ermey was fifty-two when The Frighteners opened, nine years past Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) — the role that fixed his screen identity as the ultimate drill-instructor archetype in American cinema. Sgt. Hiles, the ghostly master sergeant who polices the Fairwater cemetery, is built as a direct rhyme on Hartman. The casting is a one-line joke that extends across an entire performance.
A real drill instructor first, an actor second
Ermey was born in 1944 in Emporia, Kansas, enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1961, served fourteen months in Vietnam, was medically discharged in 1972 at the rank of Staff Sergeant (he received an honorary promotion to Gunnery Sergeant in 2002), and drifted into the Philippines, where he met Francis Ford Coppola during the production of Apocalypse Now (1979). He served as a technical advisor on the film and appeared in it briefly as a helicopter pilot. The Boys in Company C (1978) had given him his first acting role earlier.
For the next decade he played military supporting roles in films including The Boys in Company C and Purple Hearts (1984). When Kubrick cast Full Metal Jacket in 1985, Ermey was hired as a technical advisor; he persuaded Kubrick to let him audition by improvising fifteen minutes of drill-instructor abuse on videotape. He was cast as Hartman.
"He was a perfect choice. There was no actor in the world who could have done what Lee did. Most of the dialogue in the boot camp scenes was Lee's own invention. He was the real thing." — Stanley Kubrick, Cinematheque interview (1987)
The performance — fifty percent of which was improvised — earned Ermey a Golden Globe nomination and a place in American screen history. Every subsequent military role he played was in the long shadow of Hartman, and every casting director who wanted that register went to Ermey first.
Sgt. Hiles as register-payoff
Peter Jackson cast Ermey for the precise reason a 1996 audience would recognize the voice before they recognized the actor's face. Hiles — the cemetery's resident ghost in fatigues, screaming at Frank for "using spooks to put the frighteners on people," cursing Frank as "scum," then later in the spirit-realm cemetery training ghost-Frank with "Sound off like you've got a pair!"b11 b27 — is a Hartman ghost. The film's joke is that the drill instructor outlasts the recruit.
The performance is a sustained virtuoso pass of the same comic-aggressive register Ermey had been perfecting for a decade. The "Sound off like you've got a pair!" exchange in the spectral cemetery is one of the film's biggest crowd-pleasers because it confirms what the audience already suspected: Sgt. Hiles is Sgt. Hartman, and he has been waiting for Frank Bannister.
"Ermey could not break out of the Hartman register if he had wanted to, and Jackson did not want him to. Hiles is Hartman after death, still running the camp, still calling everybody a maggot. The film treats him with affection. He is the only ghost in Fairwater who knows how to fight." — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture (2018)
After The Frighteners
Ermey worked steadily in supporting roles through the 1990s and 2000s — Saving Silverman (2001), Toy Story (1995) as the voice of Sergeant, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003 remake), Dead Man Walking (1995). He hosted Mail Call on the History Channel from 2002 to 2009, an ask-a-Marine reality program that became one of the network's longest-running shows.
He died on April 15, 2018 in Santa Monica, California, of complications from pneumonia. He was seventy-four. His Marine Corps honorary rank made him the only actor to be buried with full Marine Corps honors.