Maria Bello
Maria Bello is an actor, born 1967.
Off-Broadway theatre and a short-lived television spy series came first, and then Permanent Midnight gave Maria Bello her first real film part in 1998. Born in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 1967, she spent the decade after that as one of the most interesting actors in American film without ever quite becoming a movie star, and that distinction is worth taking seriously.
The best of it is a run in the mid-2000s. The Cooler let her play a casino waitress with no illusions and real tenderness. A History of Violence gave her the harder job, a wife who has to reappraise her marriage in front of the audience, and Bello plays that sequence of recognitions without a single explanatory line. Thank You for Smoking, Assault on Precinct 13 and World Trade Center round out a period where she was clearly choosing scripts rather than paydays.
She then did what many good actors do in their forties and took the studio work. The Mummy sequel recast her into somebody else's role, the Grown Ups films used her as ensemble filler, and Lights Out and Abduction are straightforward genre jobs. Prisoners is the exception, a small, wrecked part in a very good film.
Television gave her steadier ground, with several seasons as Jack Sloane on NCIS and later work including Beef. She has produced as well, and the filmography reads like someone who decided early that a career and a resume are not the same thing.
Movies (46)
- Grown Ups (2010)
- A History of Violence (2005)
- Grown Ups 2 (2013)
- Prisoners (2013)
- The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)
- Thank You for Smoking (2005)
- Payback (1999)
- Coyote Ugly (2000)
- Lights Out (2016)
- The 5th Wave (2016)
- Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
- Abduction (2011)
- McFarland, USA (2015)
- Secret Window (2004)
- Big Driver (2014)
- Every Day (2018)
- World Trade Center (2006)
- Max Steel (2016)
- Third Person (2014)
- Butterfly on a Wheel (2007)
- Towelhead (2008)
- The Company Men (2010)
- Giant Little Ones (2019)
- The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
- The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)
- Demonic (2015)
- The Cooler (2003)
- Flicka (2006)
- The Late Bloomer (2016)
- The Dark (2005)
TV (10)
Where to start with Maria Bello
A History of Violence first. It is the best film she has been in and it contains her best scene, a confrontation on a staircase that half the picture has been building toward, and she matches Viggo Mortensen shot for shot.
The Cooler is the one to follow it with, a small Las Vegas film that gave her the warmest part of her career and the notices she deserved. Thank You for Smoking shows comic timing that nobody used often enough. Prisoners is bleak and excellent, and her role is deliberately drained of agency, which is worth watching for how she handles it. Payback and Coyote Ugly are late-nineties studio Bello, the first much better than the second. World Trade Center is the serious blockbuster, and NCIS is where a large audience actually knows her from.
The Cronenberg and the serious dramas
This is the run worth watching. A History of Violence and The Cooler are the two that show what she can do when a director actually writes for her, and Prisoners is the best of the later work in the same register.
The studio films
The mainstream side pays for the other one. Coyote Ugly is the one people quote, the Grown Ups films are the Sandler paycheques, and the Mummy sequel replaced Rachel Weisz, which was never going to end well for anybody.
Television
NCIS is the widest-reach television and she left it after two seasons. Goliath and Touch are the dramas, and Beef is the recent one, a small part in a series that swept everything the year it aired. It is a good way to reappear.