A small man in a red suit, speaking a language that has been run backwards and forwards again. Michael J. Anderson made a career of being the thing in the frame nobody can explain, and in Carnivàle he showed he could play a man as well.
Fi1m perspective
Start in the red room. A man in a red suit stands on a zigzag floor between red curtains and says something you almost understand. Anderson's lines as the Man from Another Place in David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990–1991) were spoken backwards, recorded, and then reversed, so that every word arrives in the right order and the wrong shape. It is a trick, and Anderson is the reason it is not only a trick. He holds himself still, he waits, he seems pleased with something we are not told about. We found him unsettling in 1990 and he is no less so now, and the reason is that he never once plays the scene as strange. It is a man in a room, talking.
That room set the terms of the career. Anderson had made his scripted debut in the anthology series Monsters (1988–1990), and after Twin Peaks he became one of Lynch's regulars: the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the stage piece Industrial Symphony No. 1, and Mulholland Drive (2001), where he plays the studio power Mr Roque under prosthetics that make him a man of ordinary height. Four projects with one director is a real working relationship, and Lynch understood what he had. The rest of television did not. Anderson was cast, again and again, as elves, leprechauns and dream figures, with guest turns in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The X-Files and Charmed.
Then came Carnivàle (2003), and Samson. He runs the carnival with a cigar and a ledger, and takes orders from a boss called Management who speaks from behind a curtain and is never seen. Anderson plays him as what he is: a manager, tired, quick, not sentimental about anyone on the payroll and fond of most of them anyway. There is no whimsy in it at all. We believed he ran that outfit, that the trucks moved when he said and the takings were counted by him, and that belief is what the whole slow, dusty show rests on. Anderson called Samson "the best, most dimensional character that I have ever played." He was right, and it is a mark against the business that it took until 2003.
He retired around 2013–2014. Two parts, then: one that could only ever have been played by him, and one that any good character actor would have been glad of and he happened to get. Watch Carnivàle for the second. The first needs no recommendation from us.
Biography
Michael J. Anderson is an American actor born on 31 October 1953 in Denver, Colorado. He has the genetic disorder osteogenesis imperfecta. Before acting, he worked as a computer technician for Martin Marietta on the NASA space shuttle ground-support system and appeared in the 1984 documentary Little Mike: A Videoportrait of Michael Anderson.
Anderson is best known for playing The Man from Another Place in David Lynch's Twin Peaks (1990) and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), as well as Samson in the HBO series Carnivàle (2003–2005). He appeared in other Lynch projects including Mulholland Drive (2001) and retired from acting in 2014.
