10 Best Harry Dean Stanton Appearances
8. Alien (1979)
Brett, the mining ship Nostromo’s grouchy, Hawaiian shirt-wearing engineer, like a lot of Stanton roles didn’t get a lot of screentime (especially since he’s one of the first characters to meet a messy end), but he made the most of every second he was on screen and stood out from the rest of the crew without difficulty.
Acting as one part of a kind of working-class double act with Yaphet Kotto’s Parker, we see that these guys just want to do their jobs, fix anything that breaks on board, get paid, and hopefully not get splattered while searching for the stubborn ship’s cat. Sadly that wasn’t to be the case for poor old Brett, but he seems like a he would have been a decent guy to shoot the shit with over a beer.
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7. The Green Mile (1999)
“Walkin’ the mile, walkin’ the mile…”
Filling out the lineup of prisoners and staff in Frank Darabont’s grandiose Stephen King adaptation, Harry Dean Stanton’s grizzled old Toot-Toot is as much part of the furniture at Cold Mountain Penitentiary as the bars on the cell doors.
Toot-Toot has two primary roles in the prison: to bring the guards their snacks during their shift, and more importantly to act as a human dummy in electric chair execution rehearsals, dispassionately parroting back their instructions along the way. Particularly memorably, he goes off the standard rehearsal script and in response to “any last words” requests: “I want to shit in your hat and I want to have Mae West sit on my face because I’m one horny motherfucker!”
6. Repo Man (1984)
“It helps if you dress like a detective. Detectives dress kinda square. If you look like a detective, people are gonna think you’re packing something.”
Bud is a loquacious, slightly scuzzy mentor figure who is morally flexible but works to his own code. He teaches the tools of a dodgy trade to Emilio Estevez’s Otto as they cross L.A. reclaiming cars to settle loans, tangling with gangs and otherworldly forces along the way.
Harry Dean Stanton famously didn’t like the sci-fi genre (he said as much to Ridley Scott before joining the cast of Alien) so in his role here he acts like he’s in a slightly different movie to everyone else, doling out streetwise wisdom and taking everything in his stride. In addition to talking his way out of some dangerous situations and being generally unbothered by someone pulling a gun, Bud is also such a committed chain smoker that he’s calmly still puffing away even as he’s likely bleeding to death.
