Dick Butkus
Dick Butkus is an actor, born 1942.
Dick Butkus was, first and for a long time only, a linebacker. He played for the Chicago Bears from 1965 to 1973, was invited to eight Pro Bowls, and was twice recognised by his peers as the league's Defensive Player of the Year. His reputation rested on ferocity and on refusing to concede a single play, and he is routinely named among the most intimidating defenders the sport has produced.
The acting career that followed belongs to a specific American genre: the retired athlete whose body is the casting decision. Nobody hired Butkus to be subtle. He was hired to fill a doorway, and the better directors understood that the joke or the threat was already in the frame before he opened his mouth. He is an amiable heavy in Johnny Dangerously, himself in The Last Boy Scout, a convict on a football field in Necessary Roughness, and a steady presence across 1980s network television, from MacGyver to My Two Dads to Blue Thunder.
The strangest credit is the earliest. He appears, uncredited and as himself, in Brian's Song, the 1971 television film about his Bears teammates Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, which places him inside a dramatisation of his own locker room. He kept working on screen for decades after football and also worked as a sports commentator. He died in 2023.
Movies (7)
TV (9)
Where to start with Dick Butkus
Brian's Song is the place to begin, even though he is barely in it. The 1971 television film about Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers is one of the very few sports dramas that earns its emotion honestly, and Butkus turns up as himself inside the real story of his own team.
For the acting, Johnny Dangerously is easily the best use of him, an affectionate gangster spoof that puts his size to comic rather than menacing work. Necessary Roughness does the obvious thing and does it well, casting him as a convict on a college football field where his presence is the entire premise.
The Last Boy Scout is the sharpest film here by a distance, a mean and endlessly quotable Shane Black thriller in which he appears as himself. After that it is television: MacGyver, My Two Dads and Hang Time are where the second half of his screen career mostly lives.