Scott Patterson's best work is a man in a backwards cap who says no and means yes. As Luke Danes in Gilmore Girls he gave a programme that never stopped talking its one still point, and television has been casting him for the gruffness ever since.
Fi1m perspective
Luke Danes wears his baseball cap backwards, owns the diner, pours the coffee and disapproves of the coffee, then pours another. That is the whole performance in miniature, and Scott Patterson plays it for seven seasons without once making it cute. The scowl is real; so is what the scowl is covering. Amy Sherman-Palladino's Gilmore Girls (2000) talks faster than almost anything else on television, and Patterson is the one person in it who does not join in. He waits, he grunts, and when he finally says a plain sentence it lands harder than any of the patter around it.
He came to it late. Patterson pitched in minor-league baseball from 1980 to 1986 after leaving Rutgers, and arrived in acting in the early 1990s by way of bit parts and stunt work. Little Big League (1994) used the arm. A guest spot in Seinfeld, as Billy in 'The Sponge' (1995), and another in Will & Grace followed. Then Gilmore Girls, opposite Lauren Graham, from 2000 to 2007, and again in the 2016 revival. He was in his forties when it started, and it shows in the best way: Luke is a grown man who has already decided who he is, which is what the programme needed opposite a woman who never stops deciding.
The programme knows he is the right man for Lorelai from the start and spends years finding reasons to keep them apart, and we confess the reasons wore us down before he did. By the tired final seasons we were watching for him: for the moment he would put down the coffee pot and say something, because Patterson never spends a line he does not need. Melissa McCarthy and Liza Weil are funnier; Patterson is the reason the jokes have something to stand on. It is a performance made of refusals, and it is the steadiest thing in the programme.
Since then he has been cast, again and again, for the scowl. Agent Strahm in Saw IV (2007) and Saw V (2008), Michael Buchanan in The Event (2010), a lead in Aliens in America (2007) and now Harry 'Sully' Sullivan in Sullivan's Crossing (2023): gruff men, authority figures, the occasional brooding romantic lead. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here. What we can say is that the scowl was never the point. The point was the second cup of coffee, and we would like to see somebody ask him for it again.
Biography
Scott Patterson (born September 11, 1958) is an American actor and former minor league baseball player. He made his film debut in Intent to Kill (1992) and appeared as Billy in the Seinfeld episode 'The Sponge' (1995).
Patterson's breakthrough came with the role of Luke Danes in the television series Gilmore Girls (2000–2007). He reprised the part in the 2016 miniseries Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. He also starred as Agent Peter Strahm in Saw IV (2007) and Saw V (2008), and as Michael Buchanan in the series The Event (2010–2011).
