After months of doing this feature, we started to wonder:  are we being Europhobic?  Are our America-centric viewing habits getting the best of us?  Are countless Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians snubbing our film blog because of our unwillingness to feature beloved character actors from the Continent in That Guy!?  Well, that ends today.  For today we feature, as the lead singer of Korn gracefully put it, "the man with the fucked-up eyes":  Mr. Udo Kier.  Wherever he goes, Udo (as is befitting a man named Udo) is a candidate for the strangest man in the country.  He has played a vampire or a zombie at least a dozen times, and he is likely the only actor in the history of the world to have appeared in films by Gus van Sant, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Andy Warhol, and Rob Zombie.  Resembling nothing so much as a Helmut Newton photograph come to some semblance of three-dimensional life, Udo Kier -- who was born in Germany and almost died hours later when Allied bombers pulverized the hospital in which he was born -- cannot rightly be called a character actor so much as he can a cult actor.  Whether he's going to be a leader or a member of that cult depends on the role.  Truth be told, Udo isn't even one of the finer actors we've featured in this space; his presence in a film isn't so much a promise of a gripping performance to come as it is a dire warning that something very, very fucked up is about to happen.  He's appeared in a staggering number of films -- as many as 150 at last count -- and it is putting it extremely mildly to say that they range greatly in quality.  He was in Berlin Alexanderplatz; he was also in Spermula, a movie that we assure you we are not making up.  He was in Dogville; he was also in Barb Wire.  He has worked with some of the most talented American and European directors of the last half-century; he also put on a spanking costume and posed in Madonna's "Sex" book, and smeared fresh animal offal over his face at the behest of Paul Morrisey.  What will he do next?  Believe us when we say that a man who has been directed by both Quentin Tarantino and Uwe Boll within the last year is capable of anything.

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This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

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