You’ve seen him as the duck-painting husband of police chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo, Drew’s cross-dressing brother in The Drew Carey Show and the suspected serial killer Arthur Leigh Allen in Zodiac. Now if only you could remember his name.
John Carroll Lynch’s relative anonymity may vanish with his latest endeavour, a juicy role as the main villain in American Horror Story: Freak Show (tonight, FX Canada). But the part of the murderous Twisty the Clown requires heavy makeup, which makes him almost unrecognizable even to his co-stars.
Lynch recalls having lunch with Michael Chiklis during the shoot. “I was telling a very pedestrian story when Michael interrupted and said, ‘Do you have any idea what you look like right now?’ ” Lynch, 51, said.
It’s not the first time Lynch has spent considerable time in the costume department. His first break in 1987 was in Chicago, when he was cast as the monster in Frankenstein — Playing With Fire, as part of the touring company of Minneapolis-based Guthrie Theater. A year later, he reprised the role on the Guthrie main stage, where he worked for eight seasons.
“Any artistic sensibility I have was forged there,” said Lynch, whose most recent appearance on the Guthrie stage was as the lead in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge in 2008. “I haven’t been able to do as much stage work these days, but it’s still the thing that dominates my imagination and work ethic.”
Stephen Yoakam, who acted with Lynch during his stint in Minnesota, recalls a well-prepared colleague who was always the smartest guy in the room. “He was a voracious reader, so he had a lot of backup knowledge,” said Yoakam, whose only negative comments about his friend had to do with his hook shot on the basketball court. “During a break, if I had a question, I would always seek out his opinion.”
Lynch started to land movie roles near the end of his time in the Twin Cities. In addition to Fargo, he nabbed parts in the locally shot films Grumpy Old Men, Beautiful Girls and Feeling Minnesota.
When Guthrie artistic director Garland Wright left the theatre in 1995, Lynch soon followed suit.
“It wasn’t an economic decision,” he said. “But being in a Coen brothers movie that got Oscar-nominated legitimized me as a film actor. I had an opportunity to go to a marketplace like Los Angeles and I took it.”
The move paid off. Since 1997, Lynch has appeared in nearly 30 TV series and 40 films, including Shutter Island and Gran Torino. In Horror Story, he’s acting alongside Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett, as members of a struggling circus that features a bearded lady, a young man with lobster hands and two sisters sharing the same body.
He’s used sparingly in the first two episodes, but his few scenes are by far the most grim, as his wordless, crudely painted clown tortures and kills victims with an attitude that borders on boredom. “This is the most macabre of the psychopaths I’ve played,” Lynch said. “He’s also the most misunderstood.”
Despite the steady work, Lynch is not a household name. That’s not unusual for a character actor, said Lisa Peterson, who directed Lynch in the 2006 première of Beth Henley’s Ridiculous Fraud in Princeton, New Jersey.
“Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of a handful of character actors that turned their talent into stardom,” she said. “At the same time, John gets to work all the time and play really interesting parts. For my money, I’d rather watch a great character actor than a leading man.”
