Stephen McHattie
Stephen McHattie is an actor, born 1947.
Stephen McHattie has been working since 1970 and has over 200 credits, which means most people have watched him a dozen times without ever learning his name. The face does a lot of it: gaunt, deep-set eyes, cheekbones like tent poles, and a voice that sounds like it has been left outside overnight. Directors cast him as the man who knows something unpleasant, and he has done that job for David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky and, most productively, the Canadian director Bruce McDonald.
The catalogue of small sinister men is long. He is the first face in A History of Violence, a man in a motel who establishes the film's rules in two minutes. He is the Grand Inquisitor in The Fountain, the zealot in mother!, the aging Nite Owl in Watchmen, the police chief in a Death Wish remake. He is also, quietly, the backbone of a great deal of Canadian television, from Cold Squad and Emily of New Moon through Haven and Orphan Black.
The exception, and the reason to look him up at all, is Pontypool. McDonald's 2009 film puts him in a church basement radio station as a fired big-city shock jock and asks him to carry a horror film with a microphone and a voice. He is extraordinary in it. Nothing else in the filmography has ever given him that much room, and he has spent the years since being reliably better than the material around him.
Movies (60)
- A History of Violence (2005)
- 2012 (2009)
- Secretary (2002)
- 300 (2007)
- Watchmen (2009)
- mother! (2017)
- Immortals (2011)
- Death Wish (2018)
- Nightmare Alley (2021)
- Shoot 'Em Up (2007)
- The Covenant (2006)
- The Fountain (2006)
- Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)
- The Art of the Steal (2013)
- The Tall Man (2012)
- Geronimo: An American Legend (1993)
- Pay the Ghost (2015)
- Gray Lady Down (1978)
- Target Number One (2020)
- Wolves (2014)
- Solar Attack (2006)
- Kaw (2007)
- Stone Cold (2005)
- Come to Daddy (2019)
- The Entitled (2011)
- Jesse Stone: Night Passage (2006)
- Jesse Stone: Benefit of the Doubt (2012)
- Jesse Stone: Sea Change (2007)
- Theodore Rex (1995)
- Z (2019)
TV (15)
Where to start with Stephen McHattie
Pontypool and nothing else, first. It is a horror film set almost entirely inside a small-town radio station, and McHattie plays a disgraced broadcaster forced to describe an emergency he cannot see. He is on screen or on microphone for nearly the whole thing, and it is the performance his career was pointing at.
Then work backwards through the character parts. A History of Violence uses him for the opening minutes and sets the temperature of everything after. The Fountain and mother! are the arthouse credits, both small, both memorable. Watchmen gives him a real character with a past.
Come to Daddy is the late-career sleeper and very funny. Orphan Black is where television finally handed him a proper villain, and Secretary is the one nobody expects to find him in.
Canadian genre cinema
The low-budget Canadian horror is where he does his best work, because those films can afford him for a whole lead role rather than four scenes. Pontypool is the masterpiece and the others range from decent to gleefully silly.
Four scenes in a big film
Prestige directors keep hiring that face for a handful of minutes. Cronenberg, Aronofsky twice, Snyder twice, Del Toro. He is rarely on screen for long and you always remember he was there, which is the whole point of the casting.
The Jesse Stone television films
Nine quiet Tom Selleck detective films made for American television across a decade, and he is in almost all of them as Healy, the state police investigator. They are much better than made-for-TV Selleck sounds, and enormously watchable in a row.