Jon Gries

Jon Gries was 11 when he first stood in front of a film camera, and the man behind it was his father. Tom Gries directed the western Will Penny and cast his son as a boy in it, opposite Charlton Heston. [5] Gries has spent the six decades since as one of the working actors you recognise without always knowing the name: the arcade villain King Vidiot, Ronnie Wingate in Get Shorty, Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, and in recent years the husband with a secret in The White Lotus.

Born in Glendale, raised between two coasts

Jonathan Francis Gries was born on 17 June 1957 in Glendale, California. [1] [2] Encyclopedia.com notes that some sources give 16 June instead. [1] In an interview he described Los Angeles as his birthplace and said the family moved to New York when he was five, so his childhood was split between the two cities. [5] TV Guide lists the United States as his country. [2]

His father was Tom Gries, a writer, director and producer, and his mother was the actress Mary Munday. [1] TV Guide also names Cary Gries, a film editor and producer, as a sibling. [2] Film was the family trade. Gries has said he spent time on his father's sets as a child, including 100 Rifles in Spain in 1969, where he met the western actors Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. [5]

At 15 he was on the set of Breakheart Pass, where he got to know Charles Bronson. He remembers Bronson telling him, "You look like a girl." [5] Tom Gries died in 1977, when his son was 19. [5] Gries trained as an actor with Stella Adler, and his early stage work included King John at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and The Tempest at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. [1]

From Will Penny to the first real parts

The debut came in Will Penny in 1968, credited as Jon Francis. [2] [1] The interview text gives 1969 for the same film while its photo caption says 1968, a small mismatch in the sources. [5] The credits of the following years were television movies and small parts: Helter Skelter in 1976, Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn in 1977, and the feature More American Graffiti in 1979. [1]

Then came Joysticks in 1983, a low-budget comedy in which he played King Vidiot, an arcade bully. [6] The Austin Chronicle described the character as a mix of a Seventies David Bowie and Sid Vicious in heavy rainbow make-up. At the audition Gries joked that Vidiot came from the finger oils left on the quarters in the machines, and was told he had the part right after he said it. [6] He later recalled that the job paid only a few hundred dollars a week. [4]

Two years later he played Lazlo Hollyfeld, a reclusive genius, in Real Genius (1985). [4] [1] He then played "O.D.", a character named O.D., in TerrorVision (1986), and appeared in The Monster Squad (1987). [4] [1] Gries describes himself as a character actor who "came to things a little later" than some, and says he played baseball. [4]

The 1990s: Get Shorty, Men in Black and The Pretender

After The Grifters (1990) he took a recurring part as Shawn on the sitcom Martin from 1992 to 1994. [1] In 1995 he played Ronnie Wingate in Get Shorty, a role he says he won after about 250 other actors had been seen. [4] The same year brought the first of two Seinfeld appearances in different roles (the second was in 1998). [1] [3]

Men in Black followed in 1997. [1] From 1999 to 2000 he played Broots in the series The Pretender, and he directed one episode, "School Daze", in 2000. [1] Behind the camera he also worked on music videos through the decade, mostly rap videos for Lone Profile, and sometimes as cinematographer. [5] He was associate producer on Twin Falls Idaho (1999) and wrote the song "Wish" for it, then wrote "Silver Pieces" for The Big Empty (2003). [1] The encyclopedia entry also lists him as a member of the band Carnival Dogs. [1]

Napoleon Dynamite and the Uncle Rico effect

Napoleon Dynamite (2004) gave him the role people still quote at him. Rico is the uncle whose best days, in his own telling, were at high school. [9] Gries says he threw the steak that hits Napoleon. [4] He told the Hollywood Reporter that people relate to Rico's nostalgia for his high school "glory days". [9]

In a 2007 interview he put the film's success down to its personal feel, and said Joysticks and Napoleon Dynamite had been made for about the same money. The difference, he argued, was that Joysticks was formulaic. [6] The film brought him an Independent Spirit Award nomination for best supporting actor and three Teen Choice nominations, all in 2005. [1] [3] He reprised Rico in the Fox animated series in 2012, which was cancelled before a second season. [3] More recently he put on Rico's wig and moustache again for an ESPN segment with reporter Chris Connelly. [3]

Lost, Taken and a directing career of his own

The part of Roger Linus in Lost is the other role fans mention first. [3] He played Mark Casey, a retired CIA operative and friend of Liam Neeson's character, in the Taken films, starting in 2008. [3] [1] On television he also played Joseph Wald in 24, Martin Creaser in Supernatural (seasons 5 and 8), and appeared in Psych, Cold Case, CSI and Las Vegas. [6] [3] He voiced Sheriff Clive Skurky in the video game Hitman: Absolution and played Dr. Roberts in the Adult Swim series Dream Corp LLC from 2016. [3]

His first feature as director was Pickin' & Grinnin' (2010), a road comedy. [5] In December 2013 he was raising money for a second, the western Another Man's Gun, through Kickstarter, saying he was "more interested in getting people to give a dollar each" than in a few large cheques. [5] He named John Ford and Howard Hawks among his favourite western directors and John Cassavetes as a model for independent filmmaking. [5]

The White Lotus

In HBO's The White Lotus Gries plays Greg, a man who has a holiday romance with Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge. [3] He has said that in the first season creator Mike White floated the idea of Tanya and Greg returning, and that he objected because he had played Greg as a man near the end of his life. White replied that he wrote the show and could do what he wanted with Greg. [7] Gries came back for season 2, set in Italy, as one of only two actors from the first season. The other was Coolidge. [7] Season 2 revealed that Greg had been trying to murder Tanya. [9]

In season 3 he returned in secret under a new name, as the much older boyfriend of Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) near a Thai resort. He is the only cast member to appear in all three seasons. [9] Gries told TheWrap that White phoned him about a year and a half before the interview to ask whether he could spend four to six months away from home, and that he arrived in Thailand about ten days early to work on his tan. [8] He says he came to think of Greg as a psychopath, and rewrote much of the character's backstory to fit. [8] He credits Coolidge with a friendship and says her unpredictable choices made it hard not to break character. [8] [7]

Best-known work

Year	Title	Role
1968	Will Penny	Boy (credited as Jon Francis) [2]
1983	Joysticks	King Vidiot [6]
1985	Real Genius	Lazlo Hollyfeld [4]
1986	TerrorVision	O.D. [4]
1995	Get Shorty	Ronnie Wingate [4]
1999 to 2000	The Pretender	Broots [1]
2004	Napoleon Dynamite	Uncle Rico [3]
2008	Taken	Mark Casey [3]
2016 onward	Dream Corp LLC	Dr. Roberts [3]
Seasons 1 to 3	The White Lotus	Greg / Gary [8]
Season 2	Fallout	Biff [10]

Awards

His one individual nomination in the reference sources is the 2005 Independent Spirit Award nomination for best supporting actor for Napoleon Dynamite, from the Independent Feature Project West. [1] [3] We found no award-body listing of an individual Emmy or SAG nomination for him that we could open, so none is claimed here.

Relationships

Gries has not talked in the interviews and profiles we reviewed about a wife, a partner or children, and no reliable outlet reports one on the record. Many celebrity sites name a wife or an ex-girlfriend without a source, and we do not repeat those claims. What is documented is his family of origin: his father Tom Gries, his mother Mary Munday and the sibling Cary Gries. [1] [2] Net worth is treated the same way. We found no estimate from a named outlet such as Forbes or Bloomberg, so we give no figure.

What he does now

At 68 he appeared in the second season of Amazon's Fallout, playing Biff, a struggling New California Republic soldier who meets Walton Goggins's Ghoul on the way to the Legion's camp. [10] Goggins, who worked with him on The White Lotus season 3, said "Jon was just, like, the perfect person for it", and the showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet called him "the sweetest man". [10] In an A.V. Club interview he said that every role he has done has "done nothing to further my career", a dry remark rather than a complaint. [4]