Christopher Atkins arrived on screen with no training, a lifeguard's shoulders and a grin, and The Blue Lagoon asked for nothing else. Four decades on, the industry has largely kept asking for the same thing, and he has largely kept supplying it.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Richard in The Blue Lagoon (1980) when he is in the water. Atkins swims like somebody who has done it all his life, which he had, as a sailing instructor and lifeguard before anyone put him in front of a camera. He dives, surfaces, hauls himself onto the rocks, and for those stretches the film has an actor. Then he has to speak, and what he has is a grin. The script gives the two castaways questions about their own bodies, and Atkins answers each one with the same open, pleased face, as if waiting for somebody to tell him what the line was for.
He was a model with no acting experience when Randal Kleiser cast him, after testing thousands of others, and the film made him famous at once. Columbia signed him for four pictures. What followed was The Pirate Movie (1982), a musical comedy out of Gilbert and Sullivan, A Night in Heaven (1983), and a run as Sue Ellen's young lover on Dallas (1983–84). The pattern was set early: athletic young men in romantic or adventure settings, frequently without a shirt. From the mid-1980s the work moved to television films, low-budget features and direct-to-video, where it has mostly stayed, more than a hundred credits across four decades, with a reunion with Brooke Shields on Suddenly Susan (1999), a part for Kleiser again in It's My Party (1996), and a cameo in the 2012 Blue Lagoon remake.
The fair thing to say is that Kleiser did not help him. The Blue Lagoon trusts Néstor Almendros's lagoon to do the acting, and the camera never asks more of the boy than it asks of the water. Atkins is not bad in it. He is unguided, and the television films and direct-to-video features that followed are not where actors go to be guided. We admit that half an hour in we had stopped watching him and started watching the sea, and felt a little mean about it, because he is so plainly doing his best with so little. Shields at least has a face the camera will wait for. Atkins has a body it photographs and then moves past.
He knows all this. He has said he would rather be seen as a comedian, or in some other kind of part, and that the typecasting frustrates him a little, without any sourness about how the career went. More recently he has put it another way: "I've done everything in this business except make my own film. That's the last box I now want to check off." We would watch it, out of curiosity if nothing else. It would be the first time the man with the grin got to decide what the shot was for.
Biography
Christopher Atkins (born Christopher Atkins Bomann) is an American actor and businessman. Born on 21 February 1961 in Rye, New York, he had no prior acting experience when cast as Richard in the 1980 film The Blue Lagoon, opposite Brooke Shields. A former sailing instructor and model, he was selected from thousands of auditionees for the role.
Atkins received a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year – Actor for his debut. He later appeared in The Pirate Movie (1982) and as Peter Richards in the television series Dallas (1983–1984). His other credits include A Night in Heaven (1983), Shakma (1990) and Blue Lagoon: The Awakening (2012).
