Holt McCallany Accepts His Mission As “That Guy”
The veteran actor talks about his favorite line in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and the rumored Mindhunter movie.
In Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Holt McCallany doesn’t get to jump out of any planes. He doesn’t get to participate in any high-stakes heists, and he doesn’t even talk to Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt much. He does, however, get to say one of the movie’s best lines: “You gave him an aircraft carrier?”
It’s the kind of role that the Mindhunter and Iron Claw star is used to, as a longtime character actor and recognizable That Guy. In fact, while speaking to Inverse for the digital release of The Final Reckoning, McCallany recalled another supporting role in which a single line reading earned him the kind of recognition you’d expect of a lead.
“I remember 25 years ago I did a movie for David Fincher called Fight Club with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton,” McCallany tells Inverse. “And I had this scene where I say, ‘In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.’ And we all start chanting, ‘His name is Robert Paulson.’”
McCallany’s character was only referred to as “The Mechanic,” but decades later, he still gets approached by 15-year-old boys in airports who tell him, "Dude, his name is Robert Paulson. Say it. Say it for me one time."
“It became iconic,” McCallany says.
McCallany is part of President Erika Sloan’s cabinet.
He feels the same about his lines in The Final Reckoning, in which he plays Secretary of Defense Serling Bernstein, one of the handful of people stuck with a terrible quandary over whether to use the country’s nuclear missiles before the sentient AI “Entity” takes over the arsenal and starts armageddon. It’s a serious subplot, but one that has moments of levity, like McCallany’s aforementioned “airfraft carrier” line. If that’s not the line that takes off, McCallany also throws his hat in for, "He did it. That son of a bitch actually did it.”
“In a gigantic franchise like this, where you're not the central character, if you have a few really good moments that stand out... you got to be happy with that,” McCallany says.
McCallany knew when he got the call from director Christopher McQuarrie that he’d be part of a sprawling ensemble. But even though the call was a surprise (“I didn't even realize that I had been submitted for the project”), McCallany was convinced to join the movie when McQuarrie “really made me feel like he wanted me specifically for this part.”
“In a gigantic franchise like this, where you're not the central character, if you have a few really good moments that stand out... you got to be happy with that.”
As Bernstein, McCallany spends much of the movie bouncing off Angela Bassett, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Henry Czerny, Mark Gatiss, and Charles Parnell, who are all part of a wartime cabinet faced with a dilemma straight out of 1964’s Fail Safe.
“Our scenes were really, really, really fun to shoot,” McCallany says. “And they were dialogue-driven instead of action-driven, so we got to kind of bring out our acting chops.”
But it was working with McQuarrie that McCallany found the most rewarding: “It's been a long time since I felt as comfortable with a director,” he says. “There are certain directors that I've had the privilege of working with multiple times in my career. David Fincher is one of them.”
Fans have been calling for a proper ending to Mindhunter, which only had two seasons on Netflix.
Speaking of Fincher, I had to ask McCallany what he knew about the rumored Mindhunter movie, which would end the acclaimed Netflix crime drama that he co-starred in with Jonathan Groff. But McCallany, having learned his lesson from recently spilling the beans on the movie, was coy.
“I made a promise to myself that I would stop talking about Mindhunter only because every time I say something, it gets picked up by 500 journalists,” McCallany says. “I hope and pray that it will. But there is only one person, and I think we know who it is, who is going to make that decision. And that's my friend David. If he calls me, I'll be there, but it's absolutely 100% up to him.”
For now, he’s happy to be “That Guy” in The Final Reckoning, though it did sting a little that he didn’t get to participate in at least one big setpiece.
“That is my only regret, because I love that,” McCallany says. “When you're talking about the Mission Impossible franchise, there you're talking about action sequences that are choreographed and shot on the highest possible level.”
He continues, “But who knows? Maybe in some future collaboration with Tom and Chris, I'll be able to do that.”
