Andreas Katsulas spent much of his career under heavy prosthetics or behind a villain's scowl, and made both feel like a man with reasons. His G'Kar on Babylon 5 is the case for him: pride, injury and grievance all readable through the rubber.
Fi1m perspective
The face is not his own for most of Babylon 5 (1994–1998). G'Kar arrives under a great deal of prosthetic makeup, the sort that flattens most actors into a costume, and Katsulas does the opposite with it. He lets the pride carry into the shoulders and the voice, so that when Londo Mollari needles him you can see exactly where it lands. Our review found the quarrels between him and Peter Jurasik the strongest reason to keep watching, and we were moved more than we expected by them, because both men play a grudge as something that hurts the person holding it. That is the whole trick of the performance, and it holds for 109 episodes.
The career behind it was mostly theatre. He toured for fifteen years with Peter Brook's International Theatre Company before film and television took him up in the late 1980s, and it shows in how he uses his voice and how still he can stand. The parts that followed were nearly all men to be worried about: Joey Venza in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), the Romulan Commander Tomalak across four episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Frederick Sykes, the one-armed man in Andrew Davis's The Fugitive (1993). Casting directors saw the intensity and hired it.
The Fugitive is the better film and the smaller job. It belongs to Harrison Ford's worry and Tommy Lee Jones's dry humour, and Sykes is a piece of the machinery, the man Ford is looking for rather than a man we get to know. Katsulas does what the picture needs, which is to be a plausible threat in the scenes he has, and our review did not stop to single him out. That is not a complaint. A chase thriller as well built as that one does not need its quarry to have an inner life.
Babylon 5 did, and J. Michael Straczynski wrote him one over five seasons. Katsulas said the makeup freed him rather than trapped him, and the evidence is on screen: the character changes, and he changes with it, without losing the pride that made the early G'Kar so easy to needle. He disliked the word villain for the part and said G'Kar was a patriot, and by the later seasons it is hard to argue with him.
The series has a stiff opening and dialogue that pushes harder than it needs to, and he is not exempt from that in the first year. Stay past it. The makeup takes about an episode to stop noticing, and after that you are watching an actor, which is more than most people under that much rubber ever manage.
Biography
Andreas Katsulas (1946–2006) was an American actor. Born Andrew Katsulas in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Greek-American family, he earned a master's degree in theatre from Indiana University Bloomington. He began his career in repertory theatre and toured internationally from 1971 to 1986 with Peter Brook's International Theatre Company.
Katsulas is known for his role as Ambassador G'Kar in the television series Babylon 5 (1994–1998), Romulan Commander Tomalak in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Frederick Sykes in the film The Fugitive (1993). Other film credits include Next of Kin (1989), Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) and Executive Decision (1996).
