RIP Karl Malden

To be more specific, Stone caught a gig teaching criminology at U.C. Berkeley.

 

That was chilling stuff.

No matter how goofy and funny Gary Cole has become in recent years - The Brady Bunch Movie, Kim Possible, Dodgeball, Pineapple Express, etc. - I will never, ever forget his portrayal of Jeffrey MacDonald.

 

Gary Cole is the kind of actor I'd want to be if I was an actor. He can do pretty much anything. Another West Wing alum. He was on the Benjamin Bratt A&E Show "The Cleaner" last week and he was damn good as a news anchor who starts using speed and drinking when he learns his wife, who is also a recovering addict, has terminal cancer. That's one of those shows I'd willingly give up if it just wasn't so damn interesting and the acting so good.

Great trivia - who is the other very well known actor who also appeared in The West Wing that with Cole was a finalist for one of the leads in Miami Vice?

 

Also had a really good, small role in a tremendous movie, A Simple Plan.

I remember that in the second season of Project Greenlight (with Shia), there was a casting call and they went with William Sadler over Gary Cole.

 

Agreed. And thought he captured the MacDonald that McGinniss wrote about to a tee.

Oh, and Michael Douglas may have gotten the crazy idea to leave Streets of San Francisco for films from producing a little movie named 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'. Academy Awards can color one's thinking on career choices.

 

I'm heading out of town in a couple of hours, so I'll give the Miami Vice answer - according to IMDB, Cole and Jimmy Smitts were the runners-up for the roles of Crockett and Tubbs.

 

He was fucking brilliant as a Mike Brady parodist.

"As a wise man once said - wherever you go, there you are."

Knowing what we now know about Robert Reed's conflicted feelings about the character (among other things, but I digress), I suspect he would have pissed his pants with laughter had he seen Gary Cole's work.

 

Yeah, he was so good as Mike Brady, it's almost unnerving. Eery time I see that movie, I get a little more freaked out by just how good he was.

 

Not to mention his decidedly different role in "Office Space." Another winner.

 

ummmmm, yeahhhhh..... 8) 8) 8)

nice threadjack, by the by.

 

I remember that mini-series. NBC broadcasted it. I wanted to watch it so badly as a kid, my parents nixed that idea real fast. I was so naive that I didn't think McDonald whacked his family. About 5 years later, I was old enough to watch part of the mini-series.

Gary Cole scared the shit out of me with that performance. That was, until seeing "Midnight Caller" and I started to warm up to him.