Why William Lewis From SAS: Rise Of The Black Swan Looks So Familiar
"SAS: Rise of the Black Swan" (also known as "SAS: Red Notice") is the latest action movie burning up the Netflix Top 10 chart. The movie is based on a bestselling novel by Andy McNab. The "Black Swan" of the title is a ruthless mercenary organization that the British government covertly hires to clear out a village in the country of Georgia that's standing in the way of a pipeline build. So the mercenaries massacre everyone.
When the British government makes moves to cover up its involvement in the massacre, Black Swan leader Grace (Ruby Rose) and her soldiers-for-hire hijack a passenger train as it travels in the Channel Tunnel between England and France. Onboard the train is British Special Forces operator Tom Buckingham (Sam Heughan), who was taking a trip to Paris to propose to his girlfriend Sophie (Hannah John-Kamen). Buckingham springs into action to try to defeat Grace and Black Swan and save Sophie and the other hostages on the train.
The founder of Black Swan and the father of Grace, who he has trained to be his successor, is a man named William Lewis, who's played by two-time Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson. Here are some of the other great movies and shows where you might have seen Wilkinson before.
Tom Wilkinson was the bad guy in Rush Hour
Tom Wilkinson is an acclaimed actor who got his start on British television before transitioning to film roles in the '90s as his profile increased. He won a BAFTA in 1997 for his role in the comedy "The Full Monty," he appeared in the Academy Award for Best Picture-winning film "Shakespeare in Love," and was nominated for Best Actor in 2001 for his performance as grieving father Matt Fowler in director Todd Fields' "In the Bedroom" (via IMDb). But his most prominent blockbuster role during this period came in the action comedy hit "Rush Hour."
In the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker team-up, Wilkinson plays Hong Kong police commander Thomas Griffin, who is secretly the powerful crime boss known as Juntao, who Lee (Chan) and Carter (Tucker) spend the movie trying to find because he has kidnapped the daughter of Lee's friend. He has a memorable death scene, falling from the rafters in the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Wilkinson was a bad doctor in Eternal Sunshine
Tom Wilkinson had a significant role in the classic 2004 sci-fi romance film "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," playing Dr. Howard Mierzwak, the founder of Lacuna, a company that people hire to erase their memories. A young Lacuna employee, Mary (Kirsten Dunst), kisses him, which his wife sees only to discover that Howard previously had an affair with Mary and erased her memory of it. Tom Wilkinson specializes in playing corrupt authority figures.
Wilkinson didn't enjoy working on "Eternal Sunshine," according to director Michel Gondry. "I'd give him a direction and he'd just look me right in the eye and say, 'Why?'" Gondry told The Daily Beast. "I was petrified, and it left me wondering, 'Do I give him this direction?' I was reconsidering everything at the roots of my profession, and then he'd also do three takes and wouldn't do any more. But he was great in all three takes."
He was a supervillain in Batman Begins
Christopher Nolan tapped Tom Wilkinson for his first Batman movie, "Batman Begins," which came out in 2005. Wilkinson plays Carmine Falcone, the mafia boss of Gotham City, who is working with Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) and Ra's al Ghul (Liam Neeson) to destroy Gotham (Falcone is only in it for the money, though).
Falcone was the cellmate of Joe Chill (Richard Brake), the mugger who killed Bruce Wayne's (Christian Bale) parents, and Falcone deprives Wayne of revenge against Chill by having him whacked for testifying against him before Wayne can get to him. Falcone influences Wayne's decision to become Batman by telling him that real power comes from being feared. Later, he ends up committed to Arkham Asylum because he goes insane after being dosed with Scarecrow's fear gas.
Wilkinson speaks in an over-the-top New York accent in "Batman Begins," a choice that was amusingly parodied by comedian Stuart Laws.
Tom Wilkinson was a good guy in Michael Clayton
Tom Wilkinson earned his second Oscar nomination for his supporting turn in the beloved legal thriller "Michael Clayton." He plays Arthur Edens, an attorney at a law firm who suffers a nervous breakdown because he can no longer tolerate the morally bankrupt things he has to do as a defense attorney for corporations whose products kill people. He decides he's going to go public with the coverup, which is when the firm brings in the titular fixer, played by George Clooney, to deal with him. He opens the film with an unforgettable voiceover monologue. It's a rare role for Wilkinson where he's a bad guy who turns out to be good. Usually, it's the other way around.
"Michael Clayton" is the seventh of the nine Best Picture Oscar nominees Tom Wilkinson has appeared in. The others are "In the Name of the Father," "Sense and Sensibility," "The Full Monty," "Shakespeare in Love," "In the Bedroom," "The Grand Budapest Hotel," and "Selma."
He was a Founding Father in John Adams
Tom Wilkinson won an Emmy and a Golden Globe in 2008 for his performance in the HBO historical limited series "John Adams." He plays Benjamin Franklin, who in his depiction is a rascally raconteur who constantly overshadows the title character, played by Paul Giamatti. In the show, he speaks with his natural British accent, which he doesn't in most of his films, and you wouldn't necessarily expect him to while playing an American icon. As he explained to W Magazine, the American revolutionaries considered themselves English, and nobody knows what Benjamin Franklin sounded like anyway.
Wilkinson doesn't look much like Ben Franklin, but as he observed to W, all an actor really needs to do is have "a bald head and long hair." And it makes a lot of sense for Wilkinson to play a technically British-American historical figure, as Wilkinson studied American history at the University of Kent in England.