Christopher Hart acts with his right hand and nothing else. In Barry Sonnenfeld's two Addams Family films that hand is a full member of the household: quick, nosy, sentimental, and often the first thing in the frame we find ourselves watching.
Fi1m perspective
Somewhere in The Addams Family (1991) a hand scuttles across a surface, stops, considers, and points. It has a personality before it has done anything useful. Everything Christopher Hart does in these films he does with one hand, no face, no voice and no body, and because he was a magician long before he was an actor the trick is that you stop seeing a trick. The hand is simply Thing, and Thing is simply one of the family.
Hart trained as a magician from the age of eight and joined the Magic Castle's junior programme at sixteen. He was cast after an audition built on sleight of hand, and on something harder to test: "They wanted to see how my hand would show different emotions — happy, sad, nervous." He played Thing in The Addams Family (1991), Addams Family Values (1993) and the television film Addams Family Reunion (1998), one of only two actors to appear in all three. Then, sensibly, he took the one other part in cinema that wanted the same thing, the Hand in Idle Hands (1999). He has never stopped performing live magic.
His own account is that he thought of Chaplin, and it shows. Thing has the timing of a silent comedian, the curiosity of a small animal, and the good manners to know when a scene is not his. There is a physical cost to this that the films hide: long shoots in cramped rigs, holding a character steady while the rest of him is folded away out of sight. In the summer-camp half of Addams Family Values (1993), the better of the two films, we caught ourselves following the hand around the edges of the frame while Christina Ricci held the centre with a stare, and not once did it look like an effect. That is a stranger achievement than it sounds.
The limit is obvious, and it is the whole job. There is one part, and he has played it. Nobody leaves an Addams film talking about Thing; they leave talking about Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá, which is as it should be, since a supporting hand that upstaged the family would be a fault. His reputation is small and entirely good, and there is nothing to set against it except that it will never grow.
If you want to see what he does, pick a scene in either Sonnenfeld film and watch the hand instead of the faces for its full length. It is doing more than it lets on, which is what magicians are for.
Biography
Christopher Hart is a Canadian actor and magician. Born on 22 February 1961 in Nanaimo, British Columbia, he was raised in Los Angeles and educated in Catholic schools. He developed an interest in magic at the age of eight and later worked as a demonstrator at a magic shop.
Hart is known for portraying Thing, the disembodied hand, in the films The Addams Family (1991), Addams Family Values (1993) and Addams Family Reunion (1998). He has also appeared as The Hand in Idle Hands (1999), The Hands in an episode of Angel (1999), Lefty in Quicksilver Highway (1997) and a magician in Columbo (1989). A stage magician, he has received awards including Stage Magician of the Year from the Magic Castle.
