Remembering Ian Holm

Aren: When I heard the news of Ian Holm passing away on Friday morning, two roles immediately came to mind: Bilbo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003) and Ash from Alien (1979). The two roles could not be more different, which is an indication of what a special actor Ian Holm was. And as I thought more about how much I admire Holm as an actor and screen presence, all the other wonderful roles he played across decades started coming to mind, which shows that despite the notion of him being best remembered for these fantasy and science-fiction films, he was by no means a one-note actor. 

Anders: Absolutely. People throw around the term “stalwart,” as in dependable and memorable, but that’s what Ian Holm was. Not just a “that guy,” but a true talent.

For me, I first remembered his role in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997) as the awkward and uneasy priest, Cornelius, who carries on the mission of protecting the titular fifth element. As Cornelius, Holm portrayed a man who was both comically exasperated and out of his league, but dedicated and serious at the same time. In his best roles, Holm can embody complexity quite easily, as in the roles from The Lord of the Rings and Alien you mentioned.

I will also remember a couple of other kinds of performances from Holm in particular. I first encountered his work with Terry Gilliam, as a supporting actor in Brazil (1985) and Time Bandits (1981). Holm was great at characters who are kind of annoying and obsequious. It’s probably why Franco Zefferili cast him as Polonius in his Hamlet (1990) starring Mel Gibson. The other I will note is the couple times he provided voice work as villains: in Pixar’s Ratatouille (2007) and as Pontius Pilate in The Miracle Maker (2000), a film I’ve lauded for its great voice cast, and Holm is no exception. Holm is definitely able to bring a fussy and particular villainy in his voice roles.

Aren: He could have a stuffiness as a performer. Sometimes that was straightforward, as in Napoleon in Time Bandits, Polonius in Hamlet, or King John in your beloved Robin and Marian (1976), but sometimes it was also a smokescreen. What I loved about Holm was that he was great at disarming our expectations of his character and revealing himself to be far more complex than initially portrayed. 

Think about how in Alien, we assume Ash is this weak-willed consigliere, this man who has the ear of the captain, but also makes sentimental mistakes like allowing the crew to avoid quarantine and return to the ship. But we eventually discover that he’s an android and that he has been callously sacrificing the crew in order to capture the xenomorph. His performance was a disguise, but if you looked really closely, you could see how Holm let the truth sneak through in parts, especially in his eyes. His eyes were intense. He could mask his face and perform whatever was needed at the moment, but his eyes always clued us into the truth, which is a startling thing for a performer to do.

You also notice this with Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings, which is not as dramatic an example of disarming our expectations as Ash, but who still has hidden aspects to the performance that surprise in the moment. At first, we see this old man who seems to be living in the past. He’s a bit doddering and stuffy, but whenever the ring appears, he reveals this burning zeal—think of how his eyes flash when he says “My precious” like Gollum. And when he leaves the ring behind and gets ready for the road, walking stick in hand, he smacks his lips and smiles and looks around and we can see the young man inside him excited at the prospect of adventure. Holm was great at peeling back those layers and showing us the character in intervals. He wasn’t the most emotional performer, but there was so much nuance to his performances. I appreciated the calculated approach of repression and revelation that speaks to much about certain types of individuals.

Anders: I haven’t seen it in years, but your comment on his ability to layer performances reminds of the monologue his character gives in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997), recalling the time his baby daughter was bitten by a deadly spider. His character talks about being “the better actor” than his wife at the time in being able to project calm while being in an intense situation. It’s a great bit of acting, again demonstrating this ability to portray characters who have layers. At the same time, this is a particularly painful memory for the character in the context of the film, and reinforces the film’s theme of the splitting and dividing that trauma effects.

It also reminds me that Holm had a connection to the Canadian film scene, starring in Egoyan’s film, but also having a couple of roles in the films of David Cronenberg: Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999).

Aren: I haven’t seen The Sweet Hereafter, but I revisited both Naked Lunch and eXistenZ during our Cronenberg retrospective back in 2018. I’d forgotten that Holm plays a notable part in the films, especially in Naked Lunch, where he plays Tom Frost, a rival agent in Interzone and the husband of the woman that is a doppelganger of Bill Lee’s (Peter Weller) dead wife (both played by Judy Davis). Cronenberg takes advantage of Holm’s ability to play both duplicitous and dullard in the film, with Frost shifting between the antagonist spy and patsy throughout the course of the film’s strange machinations. It’s not a key Holm performance—neither is his work in eXistenZ as the mentor character to Jennifer Jason Leigh’s protagonist—but both films play on his expertise at playing multiple layers simultaneously, since both films deal with layers of reality. Both performances also capture his ability to ground outlandish material with genuine human emotions, particularly jealousy.

His work with Cronenberg also speaks to the fact that he was a favourite of auteurs. Directors like Egoyan, Cronenberg, and Terry Gilliam understood that securing Ian Holm for a supporting role was instrumental in communicating a radical vision on screen, since he was never anything less than credible, even in the most outlandish scenarios—think of the office in Brazil or the “Black Meat” markets in Naked Lunch. He was a professional and it’s nice to know that he’ll always be immortalized in these esoteric works from great directors in addition to the science-fiction and fantasy landmarks that we know him best for.

Rest in peace Ian Holm (1931-2020)

Related Posts