Something to watch tonight: Thursday 5 December

Six Feet Under (Ball, 2001-2005)

Here’s anoth­er “on this day” post.

Back in December 2008, I was lucky enough to inter­view the great char­ac­ter act­or Richard Jenkins in advance of his film The Visitor. This was his first lead­ing role in a film and he was clearly stoked about it at the same time as being incred­ibly modest:

Speaking to the Capital Times from his home in Rhode Island, Jenkins gave thanks to Thomas McCarthy, cre­at­or of 2004’s sleep­er hit The Station Agent, for hav­ing faith in him des­pite his lack of mar­quee pres­ence. “He asked me to read the script and I hadn’t read any­thing I liked more. But I told him, nobody’s going to give you the money with me in it!” But McCarthy per­severed, even when one exec­ut­ive pro­du­cer sug­ges­ted just weeks before shoot­ing that Morgan Freeman might be a more com­mer­cial choice.

2008 has been a great year for Jenkins. In the sopho­mor­ic buddy com­edy Step Brothers he got to impro­vise scenes about dino­saurs with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly; he was reunited with The Coen Brothers for Burn After Reading (in a part that was writ­ten for him); and in the sens­it­ive indie he shines as a wid­owed aca­dem­ic brought back from a bound­less depres­sion by a chance New York con­nec­tion with two illeg­al immigrants.

But car­ry­ing a film on his shoulders was a new exper­i­ence. “I always wondered what it would be like, you know? Could I do it? But most of all, I didn’t want to let Tom down.” He needn’t have wor­ried, as his per­form­ance anchors a typ­ic­ally humane McCarthy film about strangers thrown togeth­er and learn­ing to appre­ci­ate and then love each other.

You can read the whole thing here (includ­ing how much he rated Niki Caro after work­ing with her on North Country). He was such a sweetheart!

So, which out of Jenkins’ 116 IMDb screen cred­its should we high­light here?

I’ve chosen Six Feet Under which was, I think, where most people became aware of him. When we think about the prestige TV that came out under the HBO ban­ner in the early part of this cen­tury, it’s easy to for­get Six Feet Under but it was a huge hit at the time and extremely binge-able (at least once the DVDs came out).

There are five sea­sons of the show about a fam­ily of funer­al dir­ect­ors cop­ing with the loss of their pat­ri­arch – played by Jenkins in a role where he appears in flash­backs and dream sequences.

Sadly, The Visitor remains unavail­able on any New Zealand stream­er but I will jump right in and recom­mend it here when it does even­tu­ally appear.

Where to watch Six Feet Under

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Canada: Digital pur­chase from Apple

Ireland and UK: Streaming on SkyNow

India: Streaming on JioCinema

USA: Streaming on Max