Scene Stealers: William Atherton

With his three scenes as the "dickless" EPA agent in Ghostbusters, William Atherton imprinted himself into the consciousness of moviegoers as one of the all-time greatest scumbags of modern cinema. The role typecast him for the rest of the '80s, despite a prior decade full of varied, significant parts in films including The Day of the Locust, The Sugarland Express and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, as he was cast as a sleazy science professor in Real Genius and a sleazy television reporter in Die Hard (reprised in Die Hard 2). Now he's best remembered for these three scene-stealing assholes.

Of these three characters, Jerry Hathaway from Real Genius is the one that might be considered too large a role to really be scene-stealing, but the film's protagonist, played by Gabe Jarret, is so dull that its biggest supporting actors, Val Kilmer, who chews so much scenery that it is easy to forget he isn't the lead, and Atherton, become very memorable parts in a movie that would otherwise be forgotten. A million actors could have played Hathaway as written, but it is Atherton's prominent face and voice combined with his unique manner of speech that make the character really stand out.

It is this manner of speech, a distinctly unconventional articulation of his lines, that puts Atherton up there with Walken and Shatner as one of Hollywood's most eccentric, audibly familiar actors, yet he is disappointingly unknown by name and very faintly recognized by face. This is tragic for a man who has our undivided attention and focus in a scene shared by Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Annie Potts and a storage container full of ghosts. Unfortunately, by the time he returned as his biggest douche bag, Richard Thornberg, in Die Hard 2, audiences must have become bored or disgusted with his consistently slimy characters, or they simply wouldn't believe him as anything else, and Atherton fell into the ranks of simple supporting roles that don't allow for scene stealing.