Dennis Franz (Body Double) Body Double

Dennis Franz (born October 28, 1944, Maywood, Illinois) played Rubin, the blunt, profane film director in Body Double (1984).

De Palma discovered Franz performing with a Chicago theater company

Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) found Franz at the Organic Theater Company in Chicago and cast him in The Fury (1978) as a hapless police officer. This launched a four-film run: The Fury, Dressed to Kill (1980) as Detective Marino, Blow Out (1981), and Body Double. The trajectory — from a Chicago storefront stage to recurring De Palma player — ran parallel to Franz's work with Robert Altman during the same period (A Wedding, 1978; A Perfect Couple, 1979; Popeye, 1980). De Palma and Altman were essentially sharing Franz as a character actor in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (televisionacademy)

Rubin is a De Palma self-portrait in two different industries

Franz plays Rubin as a single character across two contexts: directing Jake in the low-budget vampire film at the start, and directing the porn film Jake auditions for later. The casting is De Palma's thesis in miniature — the same man with the same authority, just with different production budgets and different levels of respectability. Franz makes Rubin equally convincing in both worlds, which is the point.

The self-portrait dimension is deliberate: Rubin wears a jacket and sports a beard that echo De Palma's own look on set. De Palma acknowledged the joke:

"He got into the De Palma directing outfit and sort of 'did' me." — Brian De Palma, The Frida Cinema (2024)

Franz leaned into the impersonation. When asked about the character's directing style, he pointed straight at his source:

"I pointed to Brian and I said, 'Exactly like that.'" — Dennis Franz, The Frida Cinema (2024)

A demanding horror-film director played by an actor De Palma had already cast in three prior films — it's meta-commentary wrapped inside a character role.

Franz understood his role in De Palma's world

Franz appeared in four De Palma films in total and was self-aware about his function within them:

"There's a comic element to the most serious of his characters." — Dennis Franz, Body Double: The Seduction (2002)

Franz doubles as both a surrogate and a parody of De Palma

The meta-commentary runs deeper than wardrobe. Rubin directs actors through both horror and pornography with the same impatient authority, and multiple critics have noted that this doubling is the film's thesis delivered through a supporting character. The film-authority.com reviewer observed that Franz "makes for a funny surrogate for the director in various on-set film-within-a-film scenes." (film-authority)

Christy Lemire, in a review for her "Christy by Request" series, identified Franz's Rubin simply as "the demanding director" — a description that captures how the character functions in the film's opening minutes before the audience knows to read him as a De Palma stand-in. (christylemire)

Brett Arnold, in a five-star Letterboxd review, placed Rubin within the film's larger argument about Hollywood as a system of exploitation:

"De Palma violently drags Hitchcock into the sleazy '80s, emphasis on the cock, and uses that mode to comment on the predatory nature of Hollywood and its inherent connection to pornography." — geneparmesan, Letterboxd (2023)

Rubin is the mechanism through which that connection becomes literal — the same director, the same set, the same commands, just different levels of social respectability.

NYPD Blue was nine years away but the persona was already formed

Franz would become a household name as Detective Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue (1993–2005), winning four Emmy Awards for the role. But the blue-collar toughness and the impatience with pretension are already in Rubin. Body Double is a clear early sketch of the persona that would define his career.

Before Body Double, Franz had been building the persona through television: he appeared as various characters on Hill Street Blues (1983–1987), most notably as Lieutenant Norman Buntz in the final two seasons. He also appeared in Scarface (1983) — another De Palma film — in a small role.

Franz built the Sipowicz persona through De Palma and Hill Street Blues

Year	Film/Show	Role	Notes
1978	A Wedding	—	Robert Altman ensemble
1980	Dressed to Kill	Detective Marino	First De Palma collaboration
1983	Scarface	Ernie	Second De Palma
1983–87	Hill Street Blues	Lt. Norman Buntz	Recurring/regular
1984	Body Double	Rubin	Third De Palma
1987	Beverly Hills Buntz	Lt. Norman Buntz	Spin-off series
1993–2005	NYPD Blue	Det. Andy Sipowicz	4× Emmy winner