Jack Noseworthy
Massachusetts produced him and MTV gave him a profile: Jack Noseworthy came to notice through the series Dead at 21 and then spent the 1990s inside other people's genre ensembles. Encino Man (1992) and The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) put him in comedies; Alive (1993) as Bobby Francois and S.F.W. (1995) as Joe Dice pointed somewhere darker.
His useful quality is an unguarded, slightly soft look that reads as young and out of his depth, and the films of that decade used it precisely that way. Event Horizon (1997), Breakdown the same year and U-571 (2000) are three variations on one job. None of them makes him the lead and all three need him, because an audience calibrates how bad a situation has become by watching the least armoured person in the room.
He worked the odder edges too: Rodney in Cecil B. Demented for John Waters, Randy in Idle Hands, Charlie Kopetski in Barb Wire, Mr. Elias in Undercover Brother, Miles Strickland in Surrogates. A stage career ran alongside all of it, with Broadway in Jerome Robbins' Broadway and Sweet Smell of Success, and in 2013 he played Robert F. Kennedy in the television film Killing Kennedy. Neither the theatre nor that role appears among the credits listed here, which is the usual fate of an actor whose best work happened in a room without cameras.
Movies (19)
- Event Horizon (1997)
- Alive (1993)
- Surrogates (2009)
- Breakdown (1997)
- Barb Wire (1996)
- U-571 (2000)
- Idle Hands (1999)
- The Brady Bunch Movie (1995)
- Encino Man (1992)
- Undercover Brother (2002)
- Phat Girlz (2006)
- A Dennis the Menace Christmas (2007)
- Cecil B. Demented (2000)
- Unconditional Love (2002)
- The Trigger Effect (1996)
- Mojave Moon (1996)
- Poster Boy (2004)
- S.F.W. (1995)
- The Making of 'Event Horizon' (2006)
TV (3)
Where to start with Jack Noseworthy
Event Horizon is the one to see, and it holds up considerably better than its 1997 reviews: a haunted-house film with an industrial budget and a genuinely nasty imagination. Noseworthy is the least protected person on that ship, which is exactly what the film needs from him.
Then Breakdown, a lean, mean thriller that has aged into one of the best of its decade, and Alive if you want the straight dramatic version of the same survival material. U-571 is the studio submarine picture done competently. For the strange corner of the filmography, Cecil B. Demented is John Waters at his most gleefully unhinged and Idle Hands is a stoner horror comedy that knows exactly what it is. Skip Encino Man unless nostalgia is the point.