Bill Camp is the platonic ideal of a ‘That Guy'

Washington Post

18 hours ago

NEW YORK —
There is this moment Bill Camp chases. Finding it is rare. But it's beautiful. It's the elusive high. It's the drug itself. It's nearly impossible to reach intentionally, but it's also the point of his craft.
'You can feel it in a theater sometimes,' Camp says. It's difficult to describe because it is difficult to define. No one can. For all its estimated million-plus words, the English language doesn't have one for the feeling he chases, the one when 'the audience, someone onstage, the circumstances have just sort of aligned in such a way that everything goes …' Camp makes a sound with his lips meant to convey some spiritual convergence. 'The air changes,' he says. 'It's fleeting. It doesn't last. But it's electric, man. I don't know what it is. It's vibrational.'
'Just as humans, we're suddenly together,' he adds. 'I don't know how to describe it. It's pretty trippy.'
Spending time with Bill Camp is pretty trippy — after you've seen him in seemingly every movie and TV show you can think of. (An overstatement, yes, but a slight one.)
He's delighted and excitable and caught in currents of nostalgia on a sunny May afternoon, as we wander around his old stomping grounds — Lincoln Center, where his wife, Elizabeth Marvel, would perform that evening; Juilliard, where he and Marvel fell for each other while training to be actors; Central Park, where he performed Shakespeare and played softball in those early days and dreamed of what he has now.
Even if you don't know his name, you probably know Bill Camp. Even if you don't know you know him. He's the embodiment of a That Guy. He's the That Guy. (That that guy?)
During the past two decades, the 60-year-old has become one of the most reliable actors in the business, appearing in just about anything and everything from highbrow films (Alejandro González Iñárritu's 'Birdman,' Steven Spielberg's 'Lincoln,' Yorgos Lanthimos's 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer') to prestige TV (HBO's 'The Night Of,' Netflix's 'The Queen's Gambit,' Apple TV+'s 'Presumed Innocent,' the David E. Kelley show for which Camp was just nominated for an Emmy).
'I always think of Bill Camp,' Kelley says when he considers casting his shows.
''Could Bill do this? Could Bill do that?'' Kelley asks himself. 'You know he's going to deliver. He's going to show up. He's going to be prepared. He's going to make the other actors better.'
In the past few months alone, Camp appeared in Netflix's 'Sirens' and HBO's 'The Gilded Age.' He's recently filmed alongside Will Ferrell and Zac Efron in Atlanta for an upcoming comedy, and he's in two highly anticipated movies later this year: A24's 'Huntington' and Kelly Reichardt's 'The Mastermind.' This isn't even a full list of his screen work, not to mention the Tony-award nominated actor's decades of stage work.
He's the ultimate character actor. And, no, he does not find the term insulting.
'It means I play the character well. And that's the highest compliment. It's my job. It's like saying, 'He does his job well,'' Camp says. 'It also implies, I think, that I can play many different parts. That makes me happy, because that's what I strive for. That's what interests me the most: Telling all sorts of different people's stories.'
And to think, once upon a time, he quit.
Wait, there was a time when Bill Camp, probably the most reliable screen presence around, the working actor's working actor, the anchor of good shows and the elevator of weak ones — there was a time when this guy wasn't acting?
Camp graduated from Julliard in 1989 with no real-world experience: the school discouraged students from working while in training. He immediately appeared in two Shakespeare in the Park productions — 'Titus Andronicus' and 'Twelfth Night' — and landed a small film role, in 1990's 'Reversal of Fortune.'
Acting wasn't yet a career. It was 'just a thing I was doing,' he says.
And that's more or less how it remained throughout the 1990s. He was learning, particularly onstage, but he wasn't progressing to a point where it felt like a career.
'I was going to places and hanging out for six months, doing a couple of plays,' he says. 'Basically, taking everything I could learn from these actors that had done five times as many things as I had.'
After a decade of stage work, he followed his then-girlfriend Marvel to Los Angeles, hoping to break into what he calls 'commercial work,' but … 'I couldn't find a foothold there and got very frustrated by the whole deal and stopped.'
Hollywood is not Broadway. He didn't know how to audition and get a part.
'I was like f--- this place,' he says. And so he f---ed off from it.
And life piled on.
He moved back to New York. He worked random, nonacting jobs: landscaper, cook, mechanic, security guard on the graveyard shift. He f---ed back to Los Angeles. He and Marvel broke up.
Life rarely plays out the way movies do. Most of us don't get that one phone call that alters the trajectory of our lives. We don't make that one decision that changes everything. But before quitting, Camp had lived a decade of his life embodying people who did have those moments, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that he did receive one of those fork-in-the-road calls.
It was from playwright Tony Kushner. He wanted Camp to perform in 'Homebody/Kabul.'
'I really was like, 70-30, nah,' Camp says. 'I wasn't sure I wanted to pursue this anymore. I wasn't sure what I was getting out of it anymore. I felt like I was spinning my wheels. I was a mouse on a wheel.'
But.
'But then, it was Tony Kushner. And it was a part I really loved, and …'
If that's true,' that I brought him back, Kushner says, 'then at least I know that I've done one really good thing for American theater, film and television because I think Bill is one of the great actors of our era.'
'If we lived in a real, actually civilized society, Bill Camp would be as famous as any actor you could think of,' Kushner adds.
During the production of 'Homebody/Kabul,' Camp's character goes through a woman's suitcase and pleasures himself with her underwear. Camp took things a notch further by putting the panties on his head during the scene, a directive that does not appear in the script — and probably shouldn't appear in this newspaper — to mirror the main female character, who wears a burqa.
'I immediately said, 'Please, can I steal that and put it in the script?'' Kushner says. 'It was like the whole play in a nutshell, and the audience, you could feel, got it. It was so outrageous and kind of gross. The two polar opposites of the way women are treated.'
'That kind of invention from an actor is everything to a writer,' Kushner says.
In most professions, doing such a thing might not earn you the label 'true professional' nor would it win you an Obie Award, but in Camp's world, it did. His other collaborators echo Kushner's praise. They call him a 'positive role model' on set (Kelley) and describe him as 'rock solid,' 'a pro,' 'no bulls---.' (Jeff Daniels).
'When the casting director puts out his list, he's probably on it almost every time,' says Kelley, who worked with him on 'Presumed Innocent.' Camp can do drama. He can do comedy. He can be wry or serious, sentimental or cold. 'He's so versatile,' Kelley adds. 'He's like a toy for a writer.'
Daniels worked with Camp on 'The Looming Tower,' 'American Rust' and 'A Man in Full.' In these Camp 'played three different people. And they were always fully realized on take one.' Daniels credits this, in part, to Camp's theater background.
'Coming out of the theater, you've got weeks of rehearsal to get ready for an audience,' Daniels says. 'Well, the audience is the camera, and there is no rehearsal.' And Camp is always ready. 'It's as if he goes through six weeks of rehearsal to get to take one on day one, all on his own. Which is what theater people do. We come in ready. Choices have been made.'
'And that's gold.'
Gold that almost went undiscovered.
Camp first acted in 1973, in a fourth-grade production of the new musical sensation 'Godspell.' Even now, he'll claim he wasn't the best in the room, saying, 'There were some very talented people in my class who could have probably had better careers than myself that went on to do other things, like become a vet or go into finance.'
He didn't get the bug. He didn't think about it all that much. 'I had fun,' he says. 'It was a blast. But it was equally as fun as playing baseball or playing soccer or hockey or the other things I did as a young kid.'
In high school, he did a couple of plays after breaking his leg and giving hockey a rest. He went to college at the University of Vermont, where it quickly became clear he probably wouldn't graduate. He majored in just about everything for a minute — Environmental studies! Classics! Undeclared! — while working in the theater department as part of his work-study financial aid. He used his carpentry knowledge to become a stagehand, a job that took him to plays and rock shows around the state.
He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew he liked theater people.
'We're of the same sort of cut,' he remembers thinking. He liked the communal creativity. Then he spent a summer working as a carpenter at a Shakespeare festival and found himself fascinated by the language.
He put the pieces together. College wasn't working, and the theater felt like home. At 20, he decided to go for it.
'My parents were happy that I had made a choice,' he says of enrolling in the Juilliard School. 'I was really focused for the first time. I was really sure this was the right thing I was doing.'
He graduated in 1989 and quit acting about a dozen years later.
After Kushner nudged him back into acting, he finally began getting consistent screen work beyond the occasional 'Law & Order' appearance, and he had to learn that unlike on the stage, 'replication is not necessarily the goal,' he says. 'I felt like I had to be extremely consistent because I didn't want to f--- anything up. I had this understanding like 'This is how they really want it.''
'I didn't need to be a Swiss watch all the time,' he says.
It worked. Since his return to acting in 2004, he's racked up more than nearly 100 roles in TV and film, while continuing stage work.
Jobs began dovetailing and overlapping, which puts him at some ease. Having all these various parts and differing roles and types of performances, which he compares to 'the film version of being a theater actor in a company,' is comforting.
'That kind of thing is delicious to me, as an actor,' he says, as he finishes a sandwich in Central Park and returns to the present. He has to get home soon to feed his dogs: A French bulldog named Butters after the 'South Park' character and a dachshund-miniature pinscher mix named Houdini. 'There were days I'd be doing 'Sirens,' and then I'd wrap and get into the car and drive to shoot the next morning as J.P. Morgan' in 'The Gilded Age.'
'I love it. I think it's great,' he says. 'And if I wasn't a character actor I wouldn't be able to do that sort of thing.'
'And if it stops tomorrow,' he adds, 'I'll be fine.'