Why Terry O’Quinn Was Afraid of Being Typecast After Making ‘The Stepfather’

The actor on one of his earlier roles.

Transcript

00:00 Welcome to Couch Surfing, the show where dapper guests look back at their big roles, their

00:03 little roles, and everything in between.

00:05 I'm here with Terry O'Quinn.

00:08 Terry, hi!

00:09 Hi!

00:10 Let's see what's on.

00:11 You ready?

00:12 Oh, absolutely.

00:13 All right.

00:14 Oh.

00:15 Yes.

00:16 Oh, man.

00:17 I saw Lawrence Olivier do that, and I wanted to do it.

00:18 He did it, I think, yeah.

00:19 I forget what it was.

00:30 Marathon Man.

00:31 Wow.

00:32 But, oh, he's dying.

00:33 I've got to be respectful.

00:34 So people raved about your performance in this film when it came out, and Roger Ebert

00:42 called it wonderful.

00:43 I mean, it was your first time really leading a movie, right?

00:46 It was, it was, it might be my only time leading a movie.

00:50 Anyway, it was, yeah, it was certainly the first time.

00:52 I didn't know if it was going to be just horrible and embarrassing or not, but a lot of people

00:56 seemed to dig it.

00:57 I watch it now, and it looks terribly corny to me, but people seem to still dig it.

01:03 People really still dig it.

01:04 The next year or two, I said, "Hey, we need a really crazy person to stab people and kill

01:08 people and do all this nonsense," and I kind of had to watch out for only doing that.

01:16 Really?

01:17 So you've almost got typecast as the crazed killer?

01:20 The crazed killer.

01:21 Hey, that's Elaine.

01:22 And even to this day, probably the residual for the rest of my career, it's been, "You're

01:27 just untrustworthy.

01:28 You're not necessarily crazy, but we don't really believe you."

01:31 So I said, "Okay, that's cool."

01:32 [music]

01:33 [silence]

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