Remembering Actor James Handy For The Right Reasons: Commentary

Editors note: Carl Kurlander is a screenwriter (St. Elmo’s Fire), TV writer-producer (Saved by the Bell) and documentary filmmaker who teaches film at the University of Pittsburgh and is the founding program director of the Pitt in LA program. He is an occasional Deadline guest column contributor.

This past week, headlines blanketed the internet about actor James Handy, from Top Gun: Maverick, who was stabbed to death on the front lawn of his Tarzana home by the schizophrenic son of his girlfriend. The stories focused much on the call Jim’s attacker made to 911 saying: “I am the Son of Man. I just killed the Man of Sin.”

I had the honor of knowing Jim Handy early in his career and am here to testify that the man I knew was, as his agent Pam Ellis-Evenas described him when she said: “I could not have asked for a more talented, humble or gracious client and friend than James Handy.” He also had a warmth, a kindness, and a humanity we need to celebrate these days.

The frenzy that has erupted in the comment sections beneath these articles is filled with parroted bullet points: that this tragic incident is indicative of an L.A. full of sinners and crazy people who, according to one L.A. mayoral candidate, should be shipped to Seattle. Perhaps it is reflective of a president who, when Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were killed by their schizophrenic son just months ago, responded by posting that the Reiners had passed away from a “mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

I taught Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard last semester in an Intro to Film class, and the worldwide attention James Handy is receiving posthumously is eerily reminiscent of the moment in that 1950 film when reporters surround faded silent film star Norma Desmond after she murders screenwriter Joe Gillis and give her the attention she so desperately craved. Only Jim Handy was the opposite of Norma — a great character actor who himself happened to possess great character.

I first met Jim during one of the most challenging parts of my life. My mother Jeanne Wechsler had dramatically left home to pursue her long-postponed dream of being an actress on Broadway. Jim was one of the first friends she made in New York. Though my mother had many boyfriends, Jim was someone she did not date but connected with over their mutual love of acting. He had been on the soap Ryan’s Hope, but he loved the theater. My mother took me to see him in an Off Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. I was a pre-med student at Duke at the time, with no thought of becoming a writer or having any kind of creative life — but watching Jim play Chris Keller, the idealistic younger son who, after WWII, confronts his father for selling faulty parts to the military, was a performance that inspired me. In the play, Chris brings up t1 American pilots, one of them possibly his father’s other son who died in the war. It is amazing that decades later I can still feel Jim’s outrage and the truth in that scene, a father profiteering, putting his interests ahead of his country, even when it costs innocent lives.

Jim was drawing on his own experience. He had been forced to postpone his own acting ambitions when he was drafted into the Vietnam War, serving 11 months with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade in Tây Ninh. In a 2013 interview he described 27 straight days of heavy combat, jungle so dark “you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” fellow soldiers “dropping all over the place, screaming for their mothers.” He came home a pacifist, and his values of empathy and compassion aligned with my own mother’s.

I read this week about his friend Brian Delate, who met Jim at a Vietnam veterans theater company in New York and knew him for more than 40years. He told the Associated Press: “Because of the nature of how he died, and the fact that we lived in an arena of killing back in the ’60s, it has a different resonance.” Thinking back on Jim in the 1970s, it is easy to forget how badly we treated Vietnam vets — and here Jim was channeling all of that through theater.

In every performance I ever saw Jim in, he was true and authentic. He once told an interviewer: “I hated Forrest Gump. I just hated that movie. I just thought it was so full of crap. His character, Tom Hanks’s, would never have survived Vietnam. I tried to explain this to people. They never would have made it through Vietnam with that guy.”

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In 1982, the year I would head out to Hollywood on a fluke Duke/MCA-Universal Scholar Award, Jim got his first big break. He played opposite Paul Newman, who portrayed Frank Galvin, a run-down alcoholic lawyer in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict. Jim played Kevin Doneghy, the brother-in-law of a young woman left in a permanent coma after a medical error in a Catholic hospital. Carrying the frustration and heartbreak of an entire family, Kevin becomes the voice of ordinary people trapped in a system that protects the powerful — and when Frank, without telling Kevin, turns down a life-changing settlement offer, Kevin confronts him with such fury that Jim more than holds his own with Newman. Newman would be nominated for Best Actor for the role. Jim would be noticed for his authentic performance, and his career as a character actor was launched.

When I got my own break a few years later, adapting a short story I had written in college into the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, I just remember Jim being so supportive and my mother telling me again and again how proud he was of me. Jim’s first film role had come in Taps, directed by Harold Becker, whose wife Susan designed the costumes for St. Elmo’s Fire. Taps was also the breakout film for Tom Cruise. While Tom’s career would be meteoric as the true Hollywood star, Jim’s would be emblematic of the true Hollywood character actor.

He would appear in over 143 film and TV credits — as Milton Briggs, the small-town coroner trying to help Jeff Daniels figure out what was killing people in Arachnophobia. He was the exterminator in Jumanji, the doctor patching up Wolverine in Logan, the bartender Jimmy in Top Gun: Maverick — 40 years after appearing alongside that young Cruise in Taps. He played such a diversity of roles — dramatic, comedic, sometimes the bad guy — but always finding a way to show different sides of being human. As one fan wrote this week: “You could see the layers in his bad guy roles. He always let you see the person.”

On The West Wing, he played Congressman Joseph Bruno, a Republican who refused to tear down Leo McGarry over Leo’s past drug addiction for political gain. The decent man across the aisle, who chose not to weaponize someone else’s private struggle for a political win. Jim didn’t play it as a big TV moment. He played it like he played everything — with a quiet, grounded sincerity that brought out the best in the writing, because he understood that the actor’s job wasn’t to take the spotlight but to hold the truth of the scene.

Jim had an integrity that seems rare in this world. Ironically, I got to live in his New York apartment when I myself had lost my way in Hollywood. After the success of St. Elmo’s, I told myself I was going to write more stories about my generation, but when gigs were coming my way, I accepted an assignment to write a movie called Baby Talk — about a guy who, when his supermodel wife leaves him, discovers he can understand what babies are saying. I wasn’t going to take it. But then Orion Pictures and producers Steve Tisch and Wendy Finerman offered twice as much as I had made on St. Elmo’s. The script got a good reception, but I wondered if I should go to New York and go back to writing short stories from the heart. Jim was by then a working actor spending a lot of time in L.A., and so he offered me his apartment to live in. I don’t recall any money being exchanged. It was just an incredibly generous gift.

In that apartment, I got to see the private side of Jim. I recall it as a small studio space devoid of any modern amenities — no television. Just books and plays, and an asceticism associated with the priests Jim would often play. His last film performance was in a movie called Senior Entourage, where as Father MacGuffin he takes confession from stars like Ed Asner. I am glad his last role was comedic as I remember him more smiling and laughing.

What was also not in that apartment was a family, and though he had a girlfriend at the time of his death, he didn’t have any kids. Like a priest, he was married to the craft of acting. And the craft Jim spent 50 years perfecting is now under existential threat. The character actor — the journeyman who fills in the corners of every show and movie we love — has been struggling for years as streaming has hollowed out the middle class of the industry. Now AI threatens to replace the journeyman actor entirely. What is in danger is that this will strip away the soul, the raw humanity actors like Jim Handy brough to each role and replace it with flat, generalized platitudes. Jim stood against all of that. What is at stake is the question of whether the next Jim Handy will even get to exist.

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Before I conclude with a radical idea that would honor Jim and his legacy, I want to address that the son of his girlfriend was schizophrenic. This is not about right or left, MAGA or non-MAGA, but about basic human decency — the kind of decency so much of Jim Handy’s work was informed by.

I know something about schizophrenia. I have a stepsister who I idolized growing up, Ellen, who taught me to drive a stick on her convertible Mustang; who comforted me on her lap when I got sunburnt as a 10-year-old at her father’s Harvard reunion; who read giant books like Atlas Shrugged and was so brilliant that none of us were surprised when she got into Harvard/Radcliffe. After her graduation, she ended up calling my mother from Grand Central Station, where she was living on the streets. Decades later she was finally able to be housed in a group home, and today she lives blocks from me in Pittsburgh — not L.A. Mental illness does not care if you live in a red state or a blue state.

I once joked that in L.A. you die twice — once when you die, and once when your career dies and no one cares either time. But in Jim’s case, I feel the need to evoke another Arthur Miller play, Death of a Salesman: to honor who he was, ATTENTION MUST BE PAID.

I talked with a friend, Angela Campolla-Sanders, a former acting coach and casting director in L.A. who I met in my Brat Pack–adjacent days when she was Molly Ringwald’s best friend. Angie reached out when I posted about Jim on Facebook and told me she had lived in his Tarzana neighborhood — which was not filled with drug addicts and the homeless, despite what a certain president and current mayoral candidate would have you believe. (Both of whom earned their fame not through talent like Jim’s, but by being entertainers on reality shows.)

Angie and I talked about the craft of acting, and about Jim. She told me about a movie called In Memoriam that her friend Rob Burnett, the former head writer for David Letterman, is making, about a fading, bitter veteran Hollywood actor who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer, instead of focusing on his family, becomes obsessed with ensuring he secures a spot in the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam“ section. James Handy may end up there next year, but I hope it is not for his death — but for the life he lived.

To truly honor who Jim Handy was, I would propose a James Handy Award, given out each year by the Academy to a journeyman actor whose name you may not know, but who is dedicated to his craft, and whose work is infused with the values Jim embodied — empathy, compassion, humility, and kindness and most of all his ability — to remind us of our common humanity.

I would love nothing more than to raise a glass to Jim Handy and toast the life he lived, with the rest of this country, at a time when we need more than ever to celebrate work ethic, craft, and basic human decency.