In a 2014 interview in GQ, the actor Donald Sutherland recalled that a movie producer told him he wasn’t getting a role he’d auditioned for because “we’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”
It’s true: In film and TV roles that stretched over 60 years, Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, never radiated the sense that he was some random guy you might cross paths with at the grocery store. If you did, you’d remember him, maybe a little uneasily. With a long face, piercing blue eyes, perpetually curled upper lip and arched, wary eyebrows, he had the look of someone who knew something important — a useful characteristic in a career that often involved movies about paranoia and dark secrets. His voice could clear a range from excitedly high to a menacing bass that would make you feel like ducking for cover.
As an actor, he could do it all. His turn as the titular private detective opposite Jane Fonda in Alan Pakula’s 1971 “Klute” rides a tricky knife’s edge — is he a good guy? Does that term have a meaning in this case? There’s his role as a slowly more horrified scientist in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and his movie-stealing monologue as Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “J.F.K.,” loaded with the urgency of obsession. Even when playing a goofball — the womanizing prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” for instance, or Vernon L. Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen” — his loping, laconic figure stood out against the background, someone who knew a little better than he let on.
Sutherland worked constantly and, unlike some actors of his generation, never really seemed like he belonged to a single era. He’d already been at it for more than 40 years when he showed up in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” in what seemed like a minor part: Mr. Bennet, put-upon father to five daughters in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In the book, he’s sardonic and contemptuous of all but his oldest two daughters, Jane and Lizzy; the reader doesn’t walk away with particularly warm feelings about him.
But Sutherland’s version of Mr. Bennet was a revelation, without being a deviation. In a scene granting Lizzy (Keira Knightley) his blessing to marry her beloved Mr. Darcy, tears sparkle in his eyes, which radiate both love and, crucially, respect for his headstrong daughter. Suddenly this father was not just a character, but a person — a man who can see his daughter’s future in a moment and is almost as overcome as she is.
That movie doesn’t represent the start of a Sutherland-aissance, since his career didn’t need reviving. But his early performances had been set in an age when institutions were not to be trusted, and movies were suspicious of anyone in power. Sutherland himself (who was Canadian) had been on an N.S.A. watch list from 1971 to 1973, at the request of the F.B.I., thanks to his antiwar activism. He seemed to never lose his interest in confronting power.
So the role of President Coriolanus Snow, the antagonist in the deeply paranoid “Hunger Games” movies (2012-15), was a natural fit — and he thought so, too. In the GQ interview, he explained that he hadn’t been offered the role, but when he read the script for the first film, it “captured my passion.” At the time, he said, Snow only had a couple of lines, but “I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it.”
He felt “it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s,” so he wrote a letter to the director Gary Ross, expressing his passion for the project. “Power,” it began. “That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power?” Later, he noted that Snow was “quite probably, a brilliant man who’s succumbed to the siren song of power.”
Near the end of the letter, he noted that Snow didn’t look evil to the wealthy citizens of his world’s capital city, but that “Snow’s evil shows up in the form of the complacently confident threat that’s ever present in his eyes. His resolute stillness.” In the “Hunger Games” films, that stillness is evident. There’s very little sense of menace in Snow, as interpreted through Sutherland; he’s the sort of person whom someone like Katniss, the young woman caught in a whirlwind of events she both understands and wishes she didn’t have to understand, hopes she could trust. It’s Sutherland’s voice as much as his expression that gives that impression, perhaps because, as the actor understood, he’s not a cardboard cutout authoritarian. He’s an encapsulation of the idea that power, once grasped, is hard to let go of. The humanity that occasionally shines through Sutherland’s eyes as Snow makes it all the more heartbreaking.
The long list of Sutherland’s roles and accomplishments shows a man who understood emotion well. But it’s this marriage of suspicion and empathy, human feeling and the fear of humanity gone wrong, that secured his place in acting history and made him an uncommon kind of star. He didn’t disappear into a role, not exactly; he was too distinctive for that. More often, the role disappeared into him, and the result was something unforgettable.