I love a movie that gives a spotlight to a Hey It’s That Guy of long standing and lets them shine for a while. And I think we can all agree that one of the great examples of this in recent years is in A Serious Man, where Rabbi Nachtner tells Larry the story of The Goy’s Teeth. It’s not Nachtner’s story; he doesn’t appear in it. He is telling the story to Larry. But that quiet narration, with emphasis in just the right places interspersed with the bewilderment the story leads to, is what makes it a fascinating moment in the movie. The story could drag and have nothing to do with anything, but it grips you, and part of why it grips you is that George Wyner sells it. From that day, if you weren’t sure who Wyner was and had seen the movie and someone said, “Nachtner,” you’d say, “Oh, the Goy’s teeth!”
Now, technically, I have known George Wyner a bit longer than that. Not all the way back to his appearance on The Odd Couple, a show I’ve never seen that aired before my own birth, but closer than you’d think. So the odds are against my seeing his appearances on M*A*S*H and Emergency! In their initial airing, given those are both from 1978. But I’ve definitely seen both of those since and often, ditto that Columbo from before I was born. His four episodes of The Rockford Files, in recent years. There are a lot of things from as early as the 1980s that I probably saw new, including more than I’d like to admit of She’s the Sheriff.
While he’s done movies more than just A Serious Man—and how many of you would never forgive me if I didn’t mention Spaceballs?—he has also put in a lot of time at the Standard TV Actor Career, spanning so many decades that we go from that Odd Couple episode through Station 19, the fire department-based Grey’s Anatomy spin-off. And if some of the stops he’s made along the way are awfully obscure, quite a lot of them aren’t. Even in this age of streaming, he’s still managing to find the TV shows that people have heard of, including The Big Bang Theory and Grace and Frankie.
What’s more, at least as far back as that M*A*S*H episode, he was doing good work. The character he plays on it is one of those many one-time characters who appears and is claimed to have been in the background the whole time without anyone noticing them or having ever quite managed to appear on camera; he’s in the season six episode “Potter’s Retirement,” where he turns out to have been sending reports back about what things are really like at the 4077. He’s onscreen for only a few minutes and is doing fine work in them.
He’s also one of those people where we could be here for days and not have time to really talk about some shining moment of his career that someone else remembers. All the President’s Men, for example. He’s “Lawyer #2,” presumably not the most important character to the Watergate story, but I’m also sure that the only reason I don’t remember him in it is that it’s been a few years since I’ve actually watched that movie. Heck, he was even in The Postman, and if that isn’t a memorable moment in film history, well, at least it’s probably a decent George Wyner performance.