Irwin Keyes

There is a surprising number of people in acting with acromegaly. (Which led me down a rabbit hole leading to the information that Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, likely developed it after he’d finished growing and therefore without gigantism, and was possibly cured as a result of a pituitary tumor. [themoreyouknow.gif]) André the Giant, of course. But also Carel Struycken and Ted Cassidy both. Rondo Hatton, Richard Kiel, and Neil McCarthy. Interestingly, The Jeffersons had two recurring characters with the condition. Paul Benedict, who played their neighbour, and Irwin Keyes, who played Hugo Mojoloweski, George’s occasional bodyguard.

There is frankly astonishingly little information about Keyes online. It’s kind of a shame. There are a ton of obituaries, but most of them are shorter than anything you’ll read here. They all include roughly the same information, too, most of which is on his IMDb page. Yes. You’ll find the fact that he was on The Jeffersons. The fact that he started out in minor roles in movies such as The Warriors. The fact that he played a lot of thugs and a lot of sweet beefy guys. I did see one that said that he himself was a nice guy. Which is always nice to know.

Honestly, I’d be fascinated to hear some of his stories, if anyone recorded them. He worked with the Coens and Woody Allen and Rob Zombie, and that’s a heck of a sentence. He was on a season five episode of Saturday Night Live and in the original Friday the Thirteenth. This is not even getting into the other actors he worked with. Everyone from Leslie Nielsen to Cybill Shepherd to Mickey Rooney. It’s a fantastic list, even if he did little A-level content and most of that as a minor, often to the pointed of being uncredited, character.

I’ll admit I haven’t seen a ton of the stuff he’s done, because a lot of it is low-budget turkeys and I still haven’t gotten around to The Jeffersons. I’ve seen some of the best of it and frankly don’t feel I’m missing out for not having seen Death Wish 4 or the dreary ‘90s parody movies he did. Also I’m not going to watch Stardust Memories for any reason, and definitely not for an unnamed character played by an actor I kind of like. But he’s another one of those minor actors who swings back and forth between “Wow that’s a hell of a movie” to “oh, Gods, you poor thing.” It happens to even some big names.

From what I can tell, he was equally skilled at both of the kinds of character written for men with acromegaly. He could be tough and threatening, but he was probably at his best as the sweet beefy guy. He had a lovely smile, and he excelled at a particular facial expression of bewilderment. It’s adorable. He appeared on an episode of CSI about the making of a horror movie, and certainly he did his share. I just wish he had been in a better class of horror movie, or even not-horror movie, for more of his career. I wish he had the kind of career I enjoyed, not just celebrated because we should celebrate that kind of thing.