The Essential Paxton
The funniest guy in a horror film, the scariest dude in a comedy, Bill Paxton brought
unique charisma to every role. Here are six to remember.BY DARREN FRANICH
WEIRD SCIENCE(1985)Meet Chet, the big brother from hell. In
his breakout role, Paxton is so intense
he barely blinks. Still, there’s something
likable about this vulgar bully. Paxton
improvised one of Chet’s most famous
lines, about “a nice greasy pork sand-
wich served in a dirty ashtray.” (He
claimed to have heard it from his father.)
TWISTER(1996)A beloved film for ’90s kids and a block-
buster artifact from before everything
was a franchise. Paxton grounds the
tornado adventure with sheer Everyman
exuberance. He’s boyish enough to
make storm chasing look fun—and
grown-up trustworthy enough to make
it feel like a sensible career choice.
ALIENS(1986)As Private Hudson, the least cool char-
acter in one of the coolest movies ever,
Paxton is swaggering ’80s machismo
unleashed, declaring, with no irony,
“I am the ultimate badass!” Hudson
comes unglued quickly (game over,
man), and Paxton makes his clowny
desperation funny and poignant.
TITANIC(1997)In the highest-grossing film of the 20th
century, we watch Paxton watch. He
peeks through a submersible window
at the sunkenTitanic.Hesearchesfor
lost treasure. He bears witness to Rose
and her tale of love lost. It’s a small
role, but an important one: We see our
wonder reflected in his eyes.
FRAILTY(2002)For years Paxton’s dream project was
directing an adaptation of Joe R. Lans-
dale’s noir novelThe Bottoms. Though
that film never came to pass, his
directorial side career resulted in this
Southern gothic cult classic. He cast
himself as a murderous fanatic touched
by an angel—or just plain touched.
BIG LOVE(2006–11)On HBO’s underrated polygamy series,
Paxton played the patriarch in the eye
of a swirling family hurricane. As Bill
Henrickson, he conveyed old-fashioned
American-dad values gone kinkily
postmodern. Here is a perfect portrait
of an unusual man who turns out to be
only as strange as the rest of us.14 EW.COM MARCH 10, 2017
him from what you saw on the screen is true
of him as a person,” says Frost. While his
films rose up the box office charts, Paxton
became a father, the model collaborator now
a happy family man. Perhaps that’s why his
role in the dark 1998 masterpieceA Simple
Plan feels so insidiously personal. He played a
regular-as-they-come new dad who finds a lot
of money that doesn’t belong to him. Tempta-
tion makes him a monster—but Paxton,
always bringing depth and complexity where
another actor might not, suggested the des-
perate monster in every man. (That’s also the
key idea of 2002’sFrailty, Paxton’s incisive
directorial debut, in which he played a father
gone murderous with religious fervor.)
“He was a gentleman in the best sense of
the word,” Frost says. “He had this wonderful,
almost 19th-century [idea] of what a friend
should be. He wrote beautiful, handwritten
letters.” Paxton’s interests were diverse: He
loved Southern gothic literature, collected art,
and was half of the new-wave duo Martini
Ranch (James Cameron directed a music
video for the band in 1988). He also directed
the adaptation of Frost’s golf-history book,
The Greatest Game Ever Played, starring Shia
LaBeouf (and Paxton’s son, James), in 2005.
In what we now have to cruelly refer to as
his “later years,” Paxton found the perfect
project for his diverse sensibility, playing
polygamist Bill Henrickson for five seasons
on HBO’sBig Love. “He was already a staple
as this great character actor,” says Sevigny.
“What he got to play onBig Lovewas a leading
man, which he had never really done before.”
A devoted TV husband, he purchased beach
cruisers for his leading ladies—Sevigny, Gin-
nifer Goodwin, and Jeanne Tripplehorn—
emblazoned with their character’s names.
Thankfully we haven’t seen the last of Pax-
ton quite yet: He’ll appear in April’sThe Circle,
and he completed work on the first season of
his CBS seriesTraining Dayin December. The
show aired a dedication this week, but the
fate of the series has yet to be decided.
“[Bill] believed in entertainment being
transportative and transformative,” says
Sevigny. He surely transported us, and trans-
formed every project he worked on, with wit,
grace, and genuine humanity.
Additional reporting by Clark Collis, Jeff Jensen,
and Lynette Rice
WEIRD SCIENCE, TWISTER: EVERETT COLLECTION (2);ALIENS, TITANIC: 20TH CENTURY FOX/PHOTOFEST (2);FRAILTY: LIONSGATE/PHOTOFEST;BIG LOVE: LACEY TERRELL/HBO