Barry Bostwick's trade is the square: the man in the tie who walks into the madhouse and keeps his manners. He did it well in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and for six years in Spin City, and it is harder than it looks.
Fi1m perspective
Two wet people stand on a doormat in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and a man in a corset and pearls comes down in a lift and sings at them. Everything in that scene belongs to Tim Curry, and Barry Bostwick's job is to make sure of it. He plays Brad Majors as a man whose good manners are the last thing he has left, apologising his way into a house that has no use for apologies, and he never once winks at us to say he knows the joke. We grinned like idiots when Curry arrived, and we realised only afterwards that the grin needed someone on screen who was not grinning. That was Bostwick.
He came to the film from New York theatre, where he had spent the late 1960s in musicals and had originated Danny Zuko in the 1972 Broadway production of Grease. The stage is where people who saw him talk about bluff and physical comedy, in The Robber Bridegroom (1977) and They Knew What They Wanted (1976), and little of that was asked for on screen. What the screen wanted from him was the square. After Brad came the miniseries George Washington (1984), films that included the little-loved Megaforce (1982), and then the part that kept him in living rooms for six years: Mayor Randall Winston in Spin City (1996–2002), 144 episodes as the straight man again, this time opposite Michael J. Fox.
It is the same trick, and he is good at it. The straight man in a comedy has to believe in the rules everyone else is breaking, and Bostwick believes in them with his whole face. The cost is that nobody remembers the straight man. Half a century on he is still Brad, still turning up to host the anniversaries, and the profiles still lead with the doormat. The voice work in animated series and family films that fills his later years leans on the same quality, the grandfather or the official who sounds as if he means it.
We would not pretend the film career is deep. One part carries it, and that part is designed to be looked past. But watch Rocky Horror again and keep your eyes on the wrong person for a change. Bostwick has said of his casting alongside Susan Sarandon: "I think it was perfect for the film because we were strangers in a strange land." The film needed someone to stand there dripping and be shocked by it, and he was.
Biography
Barry Bostwick is an American actor. He is known for his role as Brad Majors in the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Bostwick trained at New York University’s Graduate Acting Program after studying at the United States International University. He began his career on the stage, originating the role of Danny Zuko in the Broadway production of Grease and winning a Tony Award for his performance in the 1977 musical The Robber Bridegroom. He later played Mayor Randall Winston in the sitcom Spin City (1996–2002).
