Bill Irwin's elastic movement makes him a distinctive comic performer, but his quieter acting deserves equal attention. In Rachel Getting Married, he makes a father's affection convincing by letting us see how tired he is.
Fi1m perspective
In Rachel Getting Married (2008), Bill Irwin looks worn out by people he plainly loves. As Paul Buchman, he plays an affectionate, flustered father without pressing for our sympathy. We were moved by the weariness he and Debra Winger bring to the family scenes, because it makes the affection feel earned. There is effort involved in being kind here, and Irwin lets us see it. This is where we value him most: given an ordinary person to play, he makes the difficulty of getting through a family occasion count.
His physical precision comes from vaudeville-style clowning and circus work in the 1970s. The screen work began with Popeye (1980), but the stage offers a clearer account of how those skills developed. He played Lucky in Waiting for Godot (1988), then co-created and performed the clown revue Fool Moon (1993) with David Shiner. George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2005) put his physical expressiveness and timing to dramatic use.
The risk on screen is that such a performer gets hired chiefly to be odd, a limitation of some of Irwin's early supporting parts. Jonathan Demme makes better use of him by giving the ensemble room to listen and react. Rosemarie DeWitt's Rachel has concerns beyond Kym's troubles; Irwin and Winger help make the family's affection credible without smoothing away its irritation. Nobody has to win our approval in every scene. The wedding celebrations do run long, but the actors make us willing to stay.
In Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014), Irwin's work as TARS includes puppetry as well as the voice. It is another reason not to separate the actor from the physical performer. We would still send someone curious about him to Rachel Getting Married first. More directors could afford to let him be ordinary.
Biography
Bill Irwin is an American actor, choreographer, clown and comedian. Born on 11 April 1950 in Santa Monica, California, he trained in theatre arts at Oberlin College and at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984.
Irwin began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and contributed to the revival of American circus in the 1970s. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (2005) and was nominated for four Tony Awards for Largely New York (1989). On screen he has appeared in Rachel Getting Married (2008) as Paul Buchman, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) as Lou Lou Who, and Interstellar (2014) voicing TARS. He is also known for the role of Mr Noodle on the Sesame Street segment Elmo's World.
