Why John From The Unforgivable Looks So Familiar

Even when you've signed Sandra Bullock to star in your movie, it can be nice to make sure she has a little help. Netflix's new drama, "The Unforgivable," follows Bullock's Ruth Slater as she attempts to reconnect with her sister decades after being imprisoned for a violent crime. While the streaming feature stars an Oscar winner, it certainly doesn't skimp on its supporting cast. "The Unforgivable" also spotlights actors Jon Bernthal and Viola Davis and rounds out its roster with familiar faces such as Rob Morgan ("Daredevil," "Stranger Things"), Will Pullen ("Dickinson"), Linda Emond ("Lodge 49"), and Thomas Guiry ("The Sandlot"). Wherever Bullock goes in her new and unfamiliar world, she's bound to find a scene partner who can hold their own.

That's especially true in the case of John, the husband of Liz (Davis). As seen in the trailer for "The Unforgivable," the character is part of a seemingly nice, well-off family who currently lives in the house where Ruth's life fell apart. Legendary character actor Vincent D'Onofrio, who plays John, has been stealing scenes for decades as one of Hollywood's favorite sources of both humor and menace, sometimes simultaneously. Here are some movies and television shows where you've probably seen him at work.

Vincent D'Onofrio broke out in a big way with an appearance in Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam War classic "Full Metal Jacket." His character, Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence, struggles with the rigors of boot camp and becomes a favorite victim of drill sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), who pairs him with Private Joker (Matthew Modine) and punishes the entire platoon for each of Pyle's screw-ups. After being hazed by his fellow recruits, Pyle's performance improves. As Pyle's mental stability wanes, the first section of the movie closes with a haunting scene in which Pyle kills Hartman and then dies by suicide.

"Full Metal Jacket" star Modine says the animosity between them was very real on set, particularly because of D'Onofrio's very committed method of acting. "In all those boot-camp scenes where I'm teaching him how to do up his top button, make his bed, lace his shoelaces ..." Modine explained to The Independent in February. "He just got weirder and weirder as he went into the world his character was entering into."

So, when it came time for the scene where his fellow recruits pin him to his bed and beat him with bars of soap wrapped in towels, Modine says he got a couple of extra hits in with his (soapless but still plenty damaging) towel. "Here's a couple for the movie, and here's a couple more from me," he recalled.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

In 1997, Vincent D'Onofrio took on a different sort of body transformation for his role as Edgar, aka the Bug, in the sci-fi comedy "Men in Black." In the movie, Edgar is established as an angry farmer living in upstate New York with his wife (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). The farmer's body is taken over by the film's antagonist, the Bug, an alien whose ship crashes on the farmer's property. The Bug kills Edgar and uses his skin as a disguise. The alien villain seethes with rage inside his poorly fitting Edgar suit as he goes about his mission to retrieve a precious item and spark an intergalactic war.

D'Onofrio and director Barry Sonnenfeld did a big breakdown of the character for Vulture in 2019, in which they describe how the actor came up with the character's distinctive voice and walk. The pair also discussed how makeup master Rick Baker created Edgar's look of decomposition through a combination of prosthetics and gluing different pieces of D'Onofrio's face to one another. "It was Vincent creating that character, in terms of his mannerisms," Sonnenfeld said. "I'd just make sure we dialed in the amount of rage, the amount of frustration, making sure he remained flat and didn't become a loud, big superhero-movie villain. I wanted it much subtler than that."

D'Onofrio explained that Edgar's distinctive speech pattern came from a combination of actors John Huston and George C. Scott. "He had this cadence he spoke with," D'Onofrio said of Scott, "which was kind of staccato. He'd put very weird pauses in and then fly out with a bit of dialogue."

In 2001, Vincent D'Onofrio parlayed his years of supporting work into a lead role on the "Law & Order" spinoff "Law & Order: Criminal Intent." D'Onofrio's Detective Robert Goren is, in many ways, emblematic of a certain kind of television crime solver, transposed into the staid New York of the venerable franchise. He is eclectic, awkward, and off-putting, but with a singular genius for profiling that makes him a valuable asset to the Major Case Squad and wins over even the most skeptical colleague.

But working on "Criminal Intent" was not a happy time for D'Onofrio, as he readily admits now, due to the sheer volume of work involved in making it. "You're never home," he told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast. "You never see your wife. You don't have any friendships except with people on the set. You're doing 23 episodes and working 18 hours a day." The frustration during that period gave him a bad reputation on set, per a 2018 Uproxx report, and even led the actor to be hospitalized for exhaustion in 2004 (via Today).

D'Onofrio left the show early in its ninth season in 2010 but returned to "Criminal Intent" for the 10th and final season, which was a more manageable eight episodes long.

In 2015, Vincent D'Onofrio went back to being the bad guy for his role as Wilson Fisk on the Marvel Television Netflix series "Daredevil." D'Onofrio's Fisk is better known as the brutal Kingpin of New York crime, manipulating a web of criminal elements and corrupt cops to keep himself above the fray he's profiting from. Much of the first season of "Daredevil" concerns Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and his allies' attempts to find and gather evidence on Kingpin, forcing him at times to take brutal action to protect himself. Though he spends much of the second season in prison, Fisk is freed by Season 3 to continue his rise to more powerful heights with the help of a new villain he cultivates, the unerringly accurate Benjamin Poindexter (Wilson Bethel).

"I had a pretty spectacular time on 'Daredevil,'" D'Onofrio told Looper in September. "The people at Marvel were very inventive and very creative, and the character was my kind of character ... He remains one of the most interesting, to me anyway, bad guys of Marvel."

More recently, D'Onofrio spurred rumors that his Kingpin would appear in the new "Hawkeye" series on Disney+, finally crossing the streams between Netflix's Marvel series and the main Marvel Cinematic Universe. The actor, an active Twitter user, liked and retweeted a number of comments related to the upcoming show, including fan speculation that he might be a part of it.

2015 also marked Vincent D'Onofrio's return to big-budget blockbusters when he took a role as the villainous security chief Vic Hoskins in "Jurassic World." Much like Wayne Knight's "Jurassic Park" character, Nedry, Hoskins is a guy who wants to weaponize (and profit from) any new technology he can access at the Isla Nublar theme park. In his case, it's Owen Grady's (Chris Pratt) trained velociraptors, which he hopes can be trained to work for military handlers. Though he's nominally in charge of security on the entire island, his first duty seems to be protecting InGen's genetic research into dinosaurs, a devotion that winds up getting him killed by the raptors after Owen loses control of them to Indominus Rex.

Even when he's playing a guy with a scheme as outlandish as Hoskins, D'Onofrio stays committed to his method of acting. While he may not be in favor of weaponizing dinosaur technology, the "Jurassic World" actor said that when he's in character "you have to be totally committed to it. "You have to believe in that opinion and think that everyone else is wrong — and eventually that you'll turn them around" (via CBR.com).