This is Sunday afternoon in Buffalo and Los Angeles, two places actor William Fichtner holds close. It’s 70-something and sunny in Southern California, where Fichtner lives, and 10 degrees cooler and rainy in Buffalo, where Fichtner was heading.
It’s 2:33 p.m. here in Buffalo and the phone rings.
“Sorry,” says Fichtner, who is unfailingly polite. He’s only three minutes late for the call.
“It’s such a nice, sunny day,” he says, “and I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks, so I took my old Road Runner out.”
Fichtner has since returned to his hometown with his wife, Kym, and staying for much of the month. They are picking up their son from college in Syracuse. Fichtner is planning to drop by the PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester. He’s doing some charity dinners, and he’s planning to join his friend, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, “to support the mayor and our beautiful city” as the community joins together to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the May 14 racist mass shooting.
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Fichtner is also going to see a movie. A movie he is in: “Hypnotic,” in which Fichtner portrays a suspicious and uncannily elusive character (Dellrayne) pursued by Detective Danny Rourke, played by Ben Affleck.
Acting opposite megastars like Affleck is normal for Fichtner, whose onscreen career began in the mid-1980s. His credits include smash franchises (among them: “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Independence Day: Resurgence”), iconic films (too many to list but including: “Black Hawk Down,” “The Dark Knight” and “Armageddon,” which also starred Affleck) and hit television (most recently “Mom”).
But walking into a theater (or turning on a television) to watch his own work is unusual for Fichtner, especially in recent years.
“I haven’t watched ‘The Company You Keep,’ ” Fichtner says, referring to the new ABC show in which he plays a doting father and grandfather who doubles as a con man. “I sure like doing it, but I don’t watch it. I stopped watching television, I think, around when I was working on ‘Prison Break.’ ”
We’re talking 2005 or so. Fichtner played a man-hunting FBI agent in the Fox series.
“A lot of times, you’ll work on a scene, and it’s on air three weeks later,” Fichtner says. “It’s so fresh, and you remember every moment, and I remember seeing a couple of episodes of ‘Prison Break’ when I was on it and thinking to myself, ‘Why in the world did you pick that take?’ I was like, ‘I can’t watch it.’ And I don’t need to watch it. I don’t think I have that built-in ego.”
But Fichtner does have a built-in curiosity for how the stories he helps tell impact audiences, and he’ll watch for that. Back in 2018, he stood in the rear of the theater to see how the crowd reacted to “Cold Brook,” the movie he wrote over the course of a decade and then shot in Western New York. (Fichtner had to watch himself in the process; he was also the star of the movie.) He will absorb that feedback in real time when he delivers the commencement address on May 20 for Villa Maria College in his hometown of Cheektowaga.
William Fichtner directs actor Kim Coates on the set of "Cold Brook," which he made in the Buffalo area.
Fichtner will get it, too, when he and Kym join a group of his friends from Maryvale High School, where he graduated in 1974, to watch “Hypnotic,” which opened May 11.
“I want to see the film again,” says Fichtner, who saw an early screening this winter at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. “I want Kymmy to see it with me, and a bunch of high school friends. There’s a group of us that still keep in touch. The chance to see them alone is great, but to get a bunch of them to go and see the film, it just sounds like the perfect evening.”
“Hypnotic,” written and directed by Robert Rodriguez, follows Affleck’s Danny Rourke as he searches for his missing daughter, played by Hala Finley. Fichtner’s Dellrayne is his nemesis: villainous, stylish and unshakably present, with the ability to say a few words that hypnotize anyone (well, nearly anyone) who falls into his icy gaze.
“I cannot imagine someone better for this character; I mean, he’s actually got this hypnotic quality to him,” Rodriguez said of Fichtner in the film’s production notes. “You put the camera front and center and it’s there.”
Rodriguez, an all-in-one filmmaker who keeps a close hand in casting, shooting and editing his movies, wanted Fichtner for the role. In August of 2021, Fichtner was heading home from Australia, where he was shooting Peacock’s “Joe vs. Carole.” He was at the Sydney airport when his agents got in touch and said there was a script that Robert Rodriguez was doing. Fichtner, who had long wanted to work with Rodriguez, said " ‘Send it to me right now. I’m about to board the plane. I’ll read it right away.’ ”
Fichtner bought Wi-Fi service on the plane, read the script in a couple of hours. Dellrayne struck him as a “character of mystery,” and the storyline wrapped him in. “I’ve read things where I really liked the role, but I didn't think the whole piece worked, and then it’s not a worthy journey for me,” he says. “But this was something that I thought was just absolutely fascinating.”
Fichtner found himself flipping back through pages, absorbing more details. The “hypnotics” in the film are capable of altering people’s perspectives, making the characters – and the audience – question where they are, and what’s really happening.
“People think they’re in one place, and they may not actually be there,” Fichtner says. “Or they might be. Maybe what looks real could be real. Or it might not.”
He imagined, too, what Rodriguez – in his style that is “strong and shocking, and colorful and gritty, and raw and real and emotional” – would do with the film. From the plane, Fichtner emailed his reps: “Absolutely.”
Back in L.A., he met via Zoom with Rodriguez, who gave him the role on the spot, and that fall, Fichtner reunited with Affleck and joined the rest of the cast for the shoot. As happens in Hollywood, the production timeline of the movie stretched over the following couple of years, and the next word Fichtner received on it was an invite to the South by Southwest screening. The film starts fast, with Fichtner’s Dellrayne igniting trouble in the first several minutes.
About 20 minutes into the movie during that festival screening, Fichtner turned to his manager Mark Armstrong, who was sitting next to him, and asked, “Is this as good as I think it is?”
“It is,” his manager said.
Hearing that anytime is good. But seeing that happen in Buffalo, with his wife in the theater and joined by his friends from Maryvale High? That would push what Fichtner calls “the perfect evening” just a little closer to perfection in its purest form.
