One Indelible Role — and That Was Enough

R. Lee Ermey 1944-2018

It’s hard to think of many actors who became as legendary as R. Lee Ermey did for just 40 minutes of screen time. Ermey, who died April 15, starred in more than 100 film and TV roles, but there was one he was born to play.

From the moment he first strolled through the barracks of “Full Metal Jacket” as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, screaming into the faces of his recruits, popping off taunts like firecrackers, you knew in your bones that you could forget every movie drill sergeant you’d ever seen. This is what those guys were really like.

Everything about Ermey seemed made of leather: his face, his neck, his vocal cords, his soul. A former U.S. Marine Corps staff sergeant, he was a technical adviser on “Full Metal Jacket,” and it was his idea to take over the role of Sgt. Hartman. He campaigned for it, showing director Stanley Kubrick an instructional video he’d made. It didn’t take Kubrick long to realize that no actor could match the found-object, lowerdepths-of-the-marines quality that Ermey brought.

Most of Hartman’s scabrously funny harangues were culled from Ermey’s improv; he was the drill sergeant as apocalyptic insult comic. Yet the more you listened, the more you realized his herky-jerky monologue of abuse expressed a worldview, one that said: If these words hurt you, then what are sticks and stones — and guns and grenades — going to do?

Hartman starts off a bugeyed fanatic, but he’s hardly a monster. In “Full Metal Jacket,” Ermey showed us something funny and shocking and horrifying and, in some screwy way, weirdly admirable. It was the spirit of combat, alive on screen in every hypnotically garish and fearlessly shouted word.

— Owen Gleiberman