As soon as John Carroll Lynch started acting as a teenager, it’s been serious business. Looking back on his performances at the Regis Jesuit High School in Denver, the Boulder-born artist can now admit that maybe he was a little too intense.
“I would get really mad at people who weren’t as serious as I was about it,” he says. “Which is not a great way to collaborate.”
That passion has since taken Lynch a long way from his Front Range beginnings. One of the most recognizable character actors of the last three decades, the 60-year-old has appeared in major blockbuster films like Fargo, Zodiac, Shutter Island and The Trial of the Chicago 7, to name a few, under the direction of greats such as the Coen Brothers, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese.
Lynch’s most recent performance comes in the revisionist western Outlaw Posse, written, directed by and starring Mario Van Peebles. The Colorado-raised actor plays an outlaw named Carson who, in 1908, returns after years of hiding in Mexico to claim stolen gold hidden in the hills of Montana.
Carson is a man who “likes to blow shit up,” according to Lynch. “He’s a sweet guy, but a ferocious warrior.” Lynch’s innate ability to play either warm and cuddly or eerie and menacing, sometimes even within the same film, is exactly what has made him appealing to so many filmmaking giants.
But there’s more to Outlaw Posse than the hyper-masculine trappings of a historically whitewashed film genre. With the director’s chair occupied by Van Peebles — who in 1993 directed and starred in the majority-Black ensemble Western Posse starring Big Daddy Kane, Richard Gant, Tone Lōc and more — Lynch says the new film carries on the tradition of widening the lens on a misunderstood chapter of American history.
“Mario wants to remind people there were plenty of African Americans in the West,” Lynch says. “Old Westerns don’t show that one of every three cowboys was Black. It’s great to be a part of something that brings that into a Western in a big and fun fashion.”
Courtesy: Highland Film Group
‘A wonderful joy’
Performing is in Lynch’s blood. The actor says he was drawn to the craft through his siblings.
“My sister is a professional comedian. My brother, when he was a senior at Regis, did a production of Camelot. Afterwards he told me that he got to be somebody else for two hours, and that sounded like a terrific relief to me,” he says. “That’s really what attracted me to acting. I just really loved it. It was and always has been a wonderful joy.”
Lynch’s early on-screen inspirations were mostly comedians. He inhaled films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers, as well as every single Monty Python episode.
“I was really drawn to comedies,” he says. “Theater was much more accessible for me in Colorado, and it actually took a while to occur to me that people could work in movies.”
That didn’t stop Lynch from making his own short films with friends. On the street he grew up on in the Denver neighborhood of Park Hill, he met a fellow film buff who liked to make movies with his Super Eight camera. Alongside the fellow kids in the neighborhood, Lynch would shoot movies and screen them at block parties.
“He would edit it together in his basement manually,” Lynch says of his childhood collaborator. “They were amazing.”
In 2017, Lynch decided to have a whirl behind the camera himself, directing the drama Lucky starring Harry Dean Stanton in one of his final roles. Watching how Van Peebles worked as a director was one of the reasons Lynch wanted to get involved with Outlaw Posse.
“I knew his work — and the work of his father [Melvin Van Peebles], too. They’re both master artists. When I read the script, it was so ambitious in so many ways. Particularly because he just had around 25 days to shoot it. As a newly minted filmmaker I was so intrigued as to how he was going to try and fit everything in.”
Lynch learned plenty working on the film, too, calling Van Peebles the “most opportunistic director” he’s ever worked with. “He’d squeeze more shots into a day than I’ve ever seen. But when he really wanted something special, he knew exactly how to set it up. He just had so much tenacity and exuberance and passion. It was impressive to watch.”
Also starring Whoopi Goldberg, Cedric The Entertainer, Edward James Olmos, Neal McDonough and the late M. Emmet Walsh, Outlaw Posse features an all-star roster that Lynch is honored to have been a part of. But while he hopes the star-studded film will help audiences adjust their misconceptions of the West, he mostly just wants them to have a good time.
“It’s a really fun movie full of twists and turns and surprises. It culminates in a spectacular action set piece,” he says. “I just hope audiences have fun. Because if they don’t find it entertaining, then none of the important messages in the film about changing the representation of Hollywood Westerns will actually end up reaching them.”
ON SCREEN: Outlaw Posse is streaming now on Amazon Prime and Apple TV.