George Wyner
George Wyner is an actor, born 1945.
George Wyner has spent half a century playing men with clipboards. The credits themselves make the case better than any summary: Camp Director, Board Member, White Sox Manager, Benning Mayor, Assistant District Attorney, Rabbi. He turned up uncredited as a cop on the beach in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye in 1973 and has barely stopped since, through Rhoda, Quincy, WKRP in Cincinnati, Hill Street Blues, Matt Houston, The Mentalist, The Kominsky Method and Reboot in 2022.
The specialty is a particular species of official: anxious, self-important, faintly sweaty, entirely certain the rules are on his side. Colonel Sandurz in Spaceballs in 1987 is the definitive version, a man whose whole function is to explain the plan to somebody who outranks him and will not listen, played at a pitch of permanent low-grade panic. He is set to reprise the part in a sequel due in 2027, forty years later.
The sustained television was Hill Street Blues, where he recurred as Assistant District Attorney Irwin Bernstein from 1981 to 1987, and She's the Sheriff, which gave him a rare lead as Deputy Max Rubin.
The films are mostly comedies that needed a straight man in a bad suit: My Favorite Year in 1982, To Be or Not to Be in 1983, both Fletch pictures as Marvin Gillet, American Pie 2, Not Another Teen Movie, and A Serious Man in 2009, where he is one of the rabbis a desperate man visits in search of an answer he is not going to get.
Movies (24)
- The Devil's Advocate (1997)
- American Pie 2 (2001)
- Spaceballs (1987)
- Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
- The Postman (1997)
- Trouble with the Curve (2012)
- A Serious Man (2009)
- The Long Goodbye (1973)
- Fletch (1985)
- Listen to Me (1989)
- Wildcats (1986)
- Spaceballs: The New One (2027)
- Fletch Lives (1989)
- In Security (2014)
- Snow Bride (2013)
- Imps* (1983)
- The Bad News Bears (1976)
- My Favorite Year (1982)
- To Be or Not to Be (1983)
- Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981)
- The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
- Willie Dynamite (1974)
- The Wish List (2010)
- Black Widow (2008)
TV (30)
- The Mentalist (2008)
- Hill Street Blues (1981)
- Quincy, M.E. (1976)
- Shark (2006)
- Matt Houston (1982)
- Rhoda (1974)
- Less than Perfect (2002)
- She Spies (2002)
- WKRP in Cincinnati (1978)
- Switch (1975)
- The Kominsky Method (2018)
- Jack & Bobby (2004)
- The Comedy Factory (1985)
- Rich Man, Poor Man (1976)
- True Colors (1990)
- Good Advice (1993)
- Journeyman (2007)
- Friends with Better Lives (2014)
- She's the Sheriff (1987)
- Delvecchio (1976)
- Goode Behavior (1996)
- Rock Me Baby (2003)
- Reboot (2022)
- Nero Wolfe (1981)
- Kaz (1978)
- Teachers Only (1982)
- The Snoop Sisters (1973)
- Adam's Rib (1973)
- Once an Eagle (1976)
- Rafferty (1977)
Where to start with George Wyner
Spaceballs, obviously, and there is no argument to be had about it. Colonel Sandurz is the role he will be remembered for, and the reason it works is that Wyner plays a man in an absurd film as though the stakes are entirely real, which is precisely the discipline that kind of comedy runs on.
A Serious Man is the best film he has appeared in and the best three-minute scene he has: a rabbi telling a parable with total conviction and no useful point. Fletch gives him the great sparring partner role opposite Chevy Chase, and Fletch Lives repeats it with diminishing returns. Hill Street Blues is the television work that paid the bills and shaped the type. My Favorite Year and To Be or Not to Be are the eighties comedies worth an evening, and The Long Goodbye is a great film in which you will need to look very hard to find him.
Spaceballs and the comedies
Colonel Sandurz has about four minutes of screen time and one immortal line about plaid, and it has followed him for forty years. He is returning to the role in the 2027 sequel.
The later films
Two Coen brothers pictures, one of which gives him the middle rabbi in A Serious Man, offering a parable about teeth and no useful advice whatsoever. It is the best thing on his film record.
The seventies and eighties television
Six years on Hill Street Blues plus guest parts in essentially every American series of the period. The list doubles as a syllabus for what network television looked like before cable.
The later television
Still working steadily into his late seventies, mostly as judges, doctors and rabbis who deliver bad news in a reasonable tone. Reboot and The Kominsky Method are the two recent ones worth seeking out.