Shea Whigham – from boardwalk to blockbuster.

Shea Whigham began his acting career on the New York stage before appearing in such acclaimed films as American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook and Joker and giving an award-winning performance as Elias Thompson in Boardwalk Empire. This summer he can be seen in the hotly anticipated Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

His breakthrough role came in 2000’s Tigerland, directed by Joel Schumacher, whom Whigham credits with nurturing the careers of Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey and Colin Farrell as well as his own. “He really helped; he found me. He would go to bat for you, and that doesn’t always happen nowadays.” During filming, Schumacher approached Whigham and asked about his aspirations – the main one being to work with the finest directors and actors. “So, about a year and a half later I get a call from Joel and he’s like, ‘Do you want to come to work with maybe the greatest actor on the planet?’” It turned out to be Anthony Hopkins, who was filming Bad Company with Schumacher in Prague. Whigham went out and the two actors connected over their shared love of literature. “He took me under his wing. We walked the cobblestone streets of Prague, and he would tell me stories about Gielgud and Olivier in the early days.”

The Silence of the Lambs remains one of Whigham’s favourite films – “Every time I see it, I marvel that Hopkins was only on screen for 21 minutes and just dominated that movie” – along with the first two Godfather films. “Every one of my kids, I sit down with them for six hours when they get to be a certain age, I go, ‘You don’t get your phone, you can’t have your friends calling you, we’re gonna sit here and we’re gonna watch Godfather I and II.’” Although his tastes are broad, he says that he always comes back to films of the 70s and 80s. “I remember where I was when I saw Rocky, like Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then Pulp Fiction hit when I was a doorman for Bruce Willis. Bruce came walking out, he’s like to me and another doorman, ‘You guys want to come over and watch Pulp Fiction?’ We couldn’t go because we couldn’t leave, but we ran over there after our shift and watched Sam Jackson and Tarantino walk out of the Lincoln Center Theater, and then I saw Pulp Fiction and it blew my mind.” Another favourite is the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men: “That is a perfect film for me.”

“ What I love to do is to really go in there and see just how close I can get to fitting into that world of 1929–38 in Boardwalk or Perry Mason, or follow a tent revival preacher in True Detective and see how close you can get to that. That’s the challenge I love.”

— Shea

However, it’s television that is now attracting some of the best talent in the business, he observes. “Put it this way, when I did Boardwalk Empire, there’s Martin Scorsese directing, Terry Winter writing, and he had just written The Wolf of Wall Street.” Tim Van Patten, who took over directing duties after Scorsese’s pilot episode, was someone else Whigham admired for his work on The Sopranos and early Game of Thrones. Other colleagues who switch between film and television include Cary Fukunaga, who went from HBO’s True Detective to direct No Time to Die, and The Revenant scriptwriter Mark L. Smith who wrote the series Whigham is currently working on, American Primeval. Although he acknowledges that the schedules can be gruelling, Whigham enjoys the opportunity to go deeper into character that the longer form offers. “It’s a great format for storytelling. What I love to do is to really go in there and see just how close I can get to fitting into that world of 1929–38 in Boardwalk or Perry Mason, or follow a tent revival preacher in True Detective and see how close you can get to that. That’s the challenge I love.”

His performance in Boardwalk Empire proved to be another springboard for Whigham’s career, bringing him to the attention of both established and younger directors. Within a short time, he had been cast in films by Oliver Stone, Werner Herzog, Terrence Malick, Damien Chazelle and Jeff Nichols. With a CV like that, it’s hard to imagine there’s anyone left on his wishlist. “Director-wise, I would love to work with David Fincher. Actor-wise, I really love what Toni Collette does, I think she’s fierce. I thought she gave the best performance of the year in Hereditary.”

There’s no question for Whigham that Christopher McQuarrie, writer and director of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, belongs among the pantheon of greats he’s worked with. “I love McQ. Here’s a guy that comes out of the gate and wins an Oscar with The Usual Suspects: I remember he’s sitting there with four behemoths of the business, and he wins, and he can’t believe it. And then he makes The Way of the Gun, and he basically goes in directing jail. But what he does is he studies film so he’s ready when he gets to sit down with Tom [Cruise] and say, ‘I’ve got an idea, I know what to do [with Mission: Impossible].’”

Having seen their partnership at close quarters, Whigham compares McQuarrie and Cruise to twins who frequently finish each other’s sentences, while his response to cynicism about Cruise’s enthusiasm is unequivocal: “You couldn’t keep that up! My antennae are pretty high in the air with people – I would know that it’s not genuine.” Unsurprisingly, the big stunt scenes were a memorable experience – although at first he was unsure if Cruise was really going to do the already celebrated jump himself. “But then he flew by us, hanging off the helicopter, waving to us, and they put him on top at the back of the ramp. When you see him screaming down the ramp, it’s so exhilarating, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.” But it doesn’t sound as if Whigham wholly shares Cruise’s taste for danger. “When you get on top of the train with him, it’s going 70 miles an hour in the most picturesque valley you’ve ever seen, Tom’s looking at you like, ‘How good is this, kid?’ I’m screaming, ‘I would want to be anywhere but right here right now!’”

However, Mission: Impossible is more than a series of set-piece spectacles: “It’s not just about the jump in Norway, it’s not just about the car chase in Rome, it’s the story within that.” And that story doesn’t dwell exclusively on Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, allowing the rest of the cast to add depth to their characters. “Everybody has their moment in this,” says Whigham. His role as Briggs hinges on two very different relationships, the first being with his sidekick Degas, played by relative newcomer Greg Tarzan Davis. Whigham felt that the age gap was something he could exploit effectively on screen. “You can’t force chemistry: you have to let it come organically together otherwise it doesn’t work. I really let that relationship happen over time in getting to know him. I’m in my fifties and he’s in his twenties, just starting out, and I thought there was something there to play.” The other key relationship is with Ethan Hunt, whom Briggs pursues throughout the film for reasons that remain nebulous, for now. “By the end, for me, it’s very personal. We don’t say it – it was my own secret.”

There will be more mysteries to unfold in the sequel, Dead Reckoning Part Two, scheduled for release next summer. Shooting a two-part film, often out of sequence and without a definitive sense of how the plot would resolve, was a new and challenging experience, but Whigham has only admiration for the filmmakers. “I don’t know how these guys do it. It’s like a sculpture: they just whittle it down, it tightens and it tightens. The beauty of it is that whatever I’m bringing to it, they will keep seeing if it fits into the story somewhere.” Their process is smoothed by researching each actor’s method in advance. “They know your films, they talk to people, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time together,” he says. “They talked to Scorsese, and they knew that I like the preparation, I like the building of characters, I like to take the script and tear it apart, and bring it back.” He soon discovered that McQuarrie and Cruise were total cinephiles (“they talk cinema 23 hours and 59 minutes out of the day”) who were happy to spend time with Whigham unpacking his character. “They want to know what I’m thinking, what I’m bringing to this huge tentpole action film, what I’m thinking the underneath for Briggs is as I chase Ethan.” But they also warned him that he should expect the films to evolve throughout production. “They go, ‘You’re gonna have to work a different way than you’re used to, Shea. You’ve got to be patient.’ I promised that I would, and at times it is difficult. But then, I tell you, it’s ever so rewarding, man.”

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is out July 10th.

Author: Rachel Goodyear