I woke up to jarring news today, with the sudden death of actor Bill Paxton due to surgical complications. He was 61 years old. I had never met Paxton, but I’ve been a fan of his work almost as long as I’ve been watching movies. Over the years, he’s had an incredible career, albeit not an overly famous one. For those who know him only from his few hit films, the man leaves behind a large body of work to explore. An A-list headliner, a B-movie character actor, a musician, director and producer, Bill Paxton wore many hats and donned many personalities over a film and television career that spanned more than 40 years. He has the distinct honor of being the only person to be killed by a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator, having appeared in all three franchises. He’s played cops, soldiers and psychopaths with passion and professionalism, and through it all you could just tell he was having the time of his life doing it.
Let’s look back on his career, which can mostly be considered in three time frames.
The Demented Years: 1983-1991
I was first exposed to Paxton around the age of 11 or 12. Within a short time, I watched (and re-watched many times) Aliens (1986), Weird Science (1985) and The Terminator (1984). Throughout puberty, Bill Paxton’s characters provided me with some of my most-quoted taglines: “You’re stewed, buttwad!” from the John Hughes sex-romp Weird Science was one of my favorites. And who could forget his ad-libbed line from Cameron’s Aliens: “Game over, man!” Yes, Bill Paxton helped me entertain myself all the way through adolescence.
Many of his characters, at least early on, were best described as unstable – some were even demented. Two early roles set the stage for many of his later characters: Mortuary (1983), his first psychopath serial killer slasher movie, and The Lords of Discipline (1982), one of his first military roles. Paxton would revisit the psycho killer role nearly twenty years later, with the 2001 religious horror film Frailty, which also marked his debut as a director. But the seeds of that performance, the unstable, chaotic fervor he brought to the role, appear in other roles. Not just in the military-obsessed older brother Chet in Weird Science and the whining and unhinged marine Hudson in Aliens, but also in later roles in Brain Dead (1990) and The Vagrant (1992), both starring roles in horror-comedies which explore the nature of fear and paranoia. Near Dark(1987) is an underrated but fantastic vampire horror film which reunites Paxton with Aliens costars Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein and features Paxton as Severen, the most psychotic vampire you’ll ever see on screen.
The Lords of Discipline offered Paxton a small role, but it marks the first of five co-starring turns with fellow actor Michael Biehn, with whom he later appeared in The Terminator , Aliens, Navy Seals (1990), and Tombstone (1994). It also marks his first turn at playing a military character. He often revisited military characters, with his early roles as unhinged weirdo soldiers in Weird Science (1985), Aliens (1986) offset by more straight-laced performances in Navy Seals (1990) and U-571 (1998). He also played multiple police officers, including a loose-cannon role in Predator 2 (1990) and his breakout performance in One False Move (1992), as well as his portrayal of real-life astronaut Fred Haise in the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 (1995). His portrayal of John Garrett in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series allowed him to combine these, playing an unhinged Hydra boss masquerading as a straight-laced government soldier.
By the late 1980’s, Paxton was getting leading roles, albeit in small budget and independent films. Some of his characters were still on the odd side of fun, but others were more human and recognizable. His co-starring turn opposite Star Wars alum Mark Hamill in the post-apocalyptic sci-fi flop Slipstream (1989) had him portraying an outsider who becomes the hero and, in the end, gets the girl. Next of Kin (1989) featured Paxton in a minor role as the younger brother of Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson who is tragically murdered, sending the remaining Gates brothers on a revenge mission – a storyline that was duplicated a few years later with Tombstone, where Paxton again plays the younger brother (this time to Kurt Russell and Sam Elliott) who is killed, setting the remaining Earp brothers out for justice. In 1991, Paxton co-starred in the dirty and utterly strange Adam Rifkin flick The Dark Backward, in which he portrays an accordion-playing trashman with a sexual fetish for morbidly obese women and dead prostitutes who befriends a mopey comedian with a third arm played by Judd Nelson.
The Mainstream Period: 1992-2006
The turning point in his career was the release of One False Move in 1992. The detective-noir mystery film was going to be released directly to home video, but word of mouth encouraged the producers to release it theatrically. Film critic Gene Siskel listed it as the best film of 1992. Over the next few years, Paxton starred in more high-profile ensemble films, including Tombstone (1994), with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in True Lies (1994), and with Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise and Kevin Bacon in the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 (1995). During the same time, he turned in memorable roles in lesser known films including the ensemble midlife crisis flick Indian Summer (1993) and opposite rappers Ice T and Ice Cube in the gangsta thriller Trespass (1993).
All of this led to his first – and only – starring role in a big-budget Hollywood film, Jan de Bont’s weathersploitation flick Twister (1996). The following year, he had a minor role with little to distinguish himself in James Cameron’s epic blockbuster Titanic (1997), which he then followed with a co-starring turn opposite Charlize Theron and a CGI ape in the remake of Mighty Joe Young (1998). Paxton brought that unhinged fun from his earlier works to his characters in True Lies and The Last Supper (1995), the last of which even seems to revisit Chet Donnelly. He continued with supporting roles in two Spy Kids movies, the big-screen remake of Thunderbirds (2004) and the memorable “Coconut Pete” in Broken Lizard’s Club Dread (2004).
TV Time: 2006-2017
Bill Paxton received high praise for a number of television roles over the past decade, beginning with his turn as the patriarch of a polygamist family in Big Love (2006-2011). In 2012, he co-starred with Kevin Costner (whose film Wyatt Earp competed with Paxton’s Tombstone) in the TV mini-series The Hatfields and the McCoys. Just before his death, he completed filming of the first season of a new series, Training Day, which modernizes the 2001 Denzel Washington film of the same name. Currently, only the first four episodes have aired, and the future of the series is uncertain.
Bill Paxton, you will be dearly missed by millions of fans who have loved watching you have fun up there on the big screen all our lives. We can only imagine the characters you might have brought us over the next few decades.
