HEY, I T ’ S T H A T GU Y !

Hey! It's That Slippery Cad Or Con Man! We admire Danny Huston for suddenly seeming to be everywhere we look, despite not having worked much yet. Huston started in the family business relatively late, and since then has shown up in only 16 movies, but still made it onto our radar. Maybe it’s that crazy-ass smile that has made him so memorable; we can’t watch him without thinking he’s smiling so hard that he’s about to blow a blood vessel. That huge smile makes Huston’s characters seem so untrustworthy — which they usually are, anyway. He was so unctuous as a casino manager on C. S. I. last year that we felt certain that he’d end up being involved with the theft of Japanese antiquities from his hotel. And he was, making it either a bad performance on his part, telegraphing his guilt, or bad casting to make Huston seem, even briefly, like he was on the up and up. Similarly, Sandy Woodrow — a diplomat in The Constant Gardener

— might pass as an upstanding member of the British Foreign Service if he were played by anyone other than Danny Huston. ( OK, Danny Trejo might be just as bad.)

Even when Huston’s the good guy, we suspect him. Though he played the beloved husband Michael to Naomi Watts’s Cristina in 21 Grams, Cristina’s devastation made us think he’d be revealed to have been cheating on her or messing with their children, making her grief tragically ironic. There was probably nothing untoward in the character of Jack Frye, the historical figure Huston played in The Aviator.

But that guy’s nickname, in

real life? “Smilin’ Jack.”

Clearly, no one was more

qualified for the role.

“Hey! It’s That Guy!” appears regularly on

Fametracker.

Tara

Ariano,

National