Sam J. Jones

The throne room in Flash Gordon (1980) is where Sam J. Jones makes sense. An ordinary quarterback with no powers, a football under his arm, takes on the household of a galactic emperor with a running play while Dale and Zarkov cheer from the sidelines and the court look on, appalled. We laughed, loudly and without irony, and the laugh depends on Jones. The joke needs a man who does not seem to know he is in on it, and he is that man: open-faced, square, entirely sincere about a thing nobody around him is taking seriously.

Elsewhere in Mike Hodges's film he is the hole in the middle. He is handsome and willing, and he says his lines rather than meaning them, while Max von Sydow plays Ming dead straight on the other side of the frame and wins every exchange. Some of that flatness may not be his: there are reports that he fell out with the producer during the shoot and that lines were dubbed afterwards. Whatever the cause, the film works around him rather than through him, and we gave it 70 for the design, for von Sydow and for the noise, not for its hero.

The career that followed is the one you would predict from the shape of the man. Six foot three, a former Marine who played football in the service, he had come to Flash straight from a debut in Blake Edwards's 10 (1979), and casting directors went on seeing what Hodges saw. There was a regular part in Code Red (1981) and the title role in The Highwayman (1988), then guest spots and lower-budget action films through the 1980s and 1990s. By the early 2000s the work had thinned enough that he retrained and spent time in private security.

Then Seth MacFarlane put him in Ted (2012) and Ted 2 (2015), as himself, and a new audience learned his name from a man sending it up. The documentary Life After Flash (2017), directed by Lisa Downs and with Jones as executive producer, tells the rest. He has been asked often enough whether he minds being one role, and his answer is plain: "Why would I disown Flash Gordon? I'm only here because of Flash Gordon."

That is the right answer, and it is also a fair account of his acting. He was never going to give you a man thinking; he could give you a man charging, which is what a comic strip asks for. Watch the throne room and the football and you will see the one scene in which the actor and the film want the same thing. Watch him in the Ted films and you will see a man who has worked out, late and cheerfully, that the blankness was the part.