Jim Fyfe
Jim Fyfe is an actor.
Most actors who leave the profession do it quietly. Jim Fyfe left it for a school. Since 2003 he has worked at Rockland Country Day School in Congers, New York, starting as a history teacher and moving through admissions director, assistant headmaster, upper division head and operations administrator while continuing to teach; since 2017 he has taught at EF International Academy and at Homestead CCHS in Hurleyville. In 2015 he also joined the production staff of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Before that, from 1988 into the mid-2000s, he was a working character actor on Broadway and on screen, largely in nervous supporting parts. He played Willie Loomis in the 1991 Dark Shadows revival and Kimmy in The Lone Gunmen; Peter Jackson cast him in The Frighteners; he guested on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The X-Files and Law and Order. Children of a certain vintage know him from HBO's Encyclopedia and as co-host of The Dr. Fad Show in 1988 and 1989.
The most interesting line on the resume is the least seen. He played Emil Berkoff in Robert Altman's Tanner '88 and came back to the same character sixteen years later for Tanner on Tanner. Very few actors get to revisit a mockumentary role in middle age.
Movies (5)
TV (7)
Where to start with Jim Fyfe
The Frighteners is the one to watch, and not primarily for him. It is the best film on this page by a distance, a Peter Jackson horror comedy that still has no real equivalent, with Fyfe in a small part as Stuart. For Fyfe himself, Dark Shadows is the fullest showcase, a prime-time gothic soap that took itself seriously and gave him a regular role in it.
The connoisseur pick is the Altman pair, Tanner '88 and then Tanner on Tanner sixteen years on, with the same character in both and a political joke that got sharper in the gap. The Lone Gunmen is worth an hour if you arrived from The X-Files. A Kiss Before Dying is a 1991 thriller he is barely in, and Moonlight Mile credits him as Server Number 2, which tells you what the last stretch of the career looked like.