Gene Bervoets

A woman goes into a motorway shop for drinks and does not come out. The man she left behind is Gene Bervoets, and what he does next, over years, is the least dramatic thing an actor can be asked to play: posters, television appeals, a new partner who is patient until she is not. In The Vanishing (1988) Bervoets plays Rex Hofman's obsession as something dull and administrative, and it is a brave choice, because the film has already introduced us to a far more interesting man. We admit that in the middle stretch our attention drifted from Rex towards Raymond, and only later did we see that Sluizer and Bervoets had arranged it that way. Rex is not interesting. That is what makes him ours.

It was his breakthrough, after theatre and a start in the late 1970s, and it did not turn him into a leading man abroad. Instead he stayed home and worked, which in Belgium and the Netherlands means working for the same handful of directors again and again. Six films for Jos Stelling. Three for Alex van Warmerdam, including The Last Days of Emma Blank (2009) and Borgman (2013), where he plays a gardener in a film in which nobody is quite what their job says. Repeated work for Erik Van Looy, in The Memory of a Killer (2003) and as the mayor in Loft (2008), and for Dominique Deruddere. In 2023 he turned up in Inside opposite Willem Dafoe, still in a supporting part, still credited by his function.

The function is usually authority. He is cast as mayors, judges, inspectors, teachers, officers, the men who sit behind the desk while the plot happens in front of it. The risk is obvious, and he knows it: he has said his particular pleasure is making the Gene everyone knows vanish into someone who gives them a fright. Hence the weight changes and the altered appearance for the bus driver in Paradise Trips (2015), and hence the deadpan he brings to van Warmerdam, where a straight face is the whole joke. Bervoets is not built for masterminds. He is built for the man the mastermind underestimates.

So the recommendation is a slightly odd one. Watch The Vanishing for the other performance, and then watch it again for his, and notice how much work it takes to be that uninteresting for that long without the film sagging under you. It does sag, a little. He carries it anyway. If Stelling or van Warmerdam ever hand him the desk instead of the chair in front of it, we would like to be there.