Bruce Boxleitner plays men in charge who are comfortable being in charge: a frontier hero, a secret agent, a station commander, his own glowing double in Tron. He is the actor you cast when the others need someone to argue around.
Fi1m perspective
Watch him take a room. Boxleitner does not enter so much as arrive, and once he is there he tends to stay put, feet planted, while the more interesting people in the scene do their shouting. He plays the man who has already made up his mind and is politely waiting for everyone else to catch up. It is not a showy way to act. It is, on the evidence of fifty years of television, a very hireable one.
The career has one shape and he has kept to it. Stage training in Chicago and New York led to guest parts from 1973, then to Luke Macahan in How the West Was Won (1976 to 1979), a Western hero when the genre was on its last legs on television. Tron (1982) gave him a double role, the programmer Alan Bradley and the programme that shares his face, and a cult that has followed him since. Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983 to 1987) made him a household name as Lee Stetson, the secret agent, opposite Kate Jackson, and he spent a stretch of the same decade playing cards with Kenny Rogers in the Gambler television films. Then, in 1994, Babylon 5.
He joined that series as John Sheridan in its second season, replacing Michael O'Hare's Sinclair as commander of the station, and some of the audience did not want him. What he brought was a more conventional military presence, a captain the viewer could read at a glance, and the show needed one. Our review of the series scored it 74 and praised the way its long story lets personal grudges grow into proper drama; it also found the opening stiff and the dialogue overemphatic. We will be honest: we rarely thought about Boxleitner while watching, and we came to think that was the job. The grudges belonged to the aliens and the ambassadors; he was the wall they bounced off, and he did not crack. He said as much himself at the time: "I like to think of this as an ensemble. I'm not the star or at the head of it . . . but like the captain, I set the tone."
The limit is plain enough. Westerns, spy comedy, space opera: the setting changes and the man does not, and anyone hoping for surprise from him will wait a long time. What he offers instead is reliability, a steady centre that lets a Kate Jackson or a cast of prosthetic-faced diplomats be as large as they like. Directors keep asking him back, most visibly for Tron: Legacy (2010), where he returned to Alan Bradley twenty-eight years on, and he has carried on with guest roles and voice work into the 2020s. Being asked back is its own sort of review, and it is not a bad one.
Biography
Bruce Boxleitner is an American actor born on 12 May 1950 in Elgin, Illinois. He trained at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago and began his career with guest roles on television series before gaining prominence in the late 1970s.
He is known for his leading role as Lee Stetson in the series Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983–1987) and for playing Captain John Sheridan in Babylon 5 (1994–1998). Boxleitner also appeared as Alan Bradley and Tron in the films Tron (1982) and Tron: Legacy (2010). He has written science fiction novels and served on the board of the National Space Society.
