Rhode Island and Delaware are the tiniest states, but they’ve had big claims to fame lately. Delaware, of course, has Joe Biden, who’s been campaigning from his home, in Wilmington. And Rhode Island managed to upstage all the other states during the virtual roll call at the Democratic National Convention, thanks to a mysterious man in black holding up a plate of calamari. The Calamari Ninja, as some people called him—he’s John Bordieri, the executive chef of Iggy’s Boardwalk Lobster and Clam Bar, in Warwick—may now be the most famous person living in Rhode Island. His competition, not counting natives who’ve moved away (Viola Davis, the Farrelly brothers) or celebrities with vacation homes there (Taylor Swift, Jay Leno), includes the character actor Richard Jenkins, who has lived in the state for the past fifty years.
“I am not the most famous person in Rhode Island, by far,” Jenkins said the other day, as he and his wife, Sharon, took a drive around Providence. He named the former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci and the former U.S. senator Claiborne Pell (both deceased) and the pro golfers Billy Andrade and Brad Faxon (eh). From behind the wheel, Sharon brought up the actor turned alt-right troll James Woods, who has several houses in Rhode Island. “Is it me?” Jenkins asked himself. “That’s a depressing thought.”
Jenkins, who is seventy-three, with the unassuming air of an assistant bank manager, is famous in a very Rhode Island way: he’s appeared in more than eighty films, but, even with two Oscar nominations, for “The Visitor” and “The Shape of Water,” and an Emmy win, for “Olive Kitteridge,” he tends to slip under people’s radars. “They say, ‘What have I seen you in?’ You go, ‘I have no idea what you’ve seen,’ ” Jenkins said. “I had a woman tap me on the shoulder on an airplane and say, ‘Have you ever been on “The Bob Newhart Show”? Because you look just like him.’ I turned around and said, ‘Are you asking me if I am Bob Newhart, or are you saying you have to look like him to be on his show?’ ”
The couple moved to Providence in 1970, when Jenkins got an apprenticeship at the Trinity Repertory Company. Back then, he said, Providence was a “burned-out mill town.” He grew up in DeKalb, Illinois, the son of a dentist. Before starting his acting career, he made pizzas, detasselled corn, and drove a laundry truck for a company run by John C. Reilly’s dad. (The two actors didn’t realize the connection until they played a father and son, in “Step Brothers.”) “We figured we’d be here a year, maybe two,” Jenkins recalled. Instead, he became a Trinity company member. For a time, he commuted to New York for auditions. “That was back when the Amtrak was about a four-and-a-half-hour train ride, if you were lucky,” he said, bringing to mind Biden’s Amtrak years in the Senate. “I would go for an audition, and I’d have two lines, like, ‘Freeze! It’s the police!’ And I’d leave.”
From Sharon’s Volvo, he pointed out low-key landmarks: the Providence Art Club, the first Baptist church in America. He didn’t begin his movie career until well into his thirties, with roles including Woody Allen’s doctor in “Hannah and Her Sisters” and a newspaper editor in “The Witches of Eastwick.”
This month, he appears in Andrew Cohn’s “The Last Shift,” as an aging fast-food worker, and in Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire,” as the patriarch of a family of small-time scammers. (“They’re just awful at it,” he said. “They can’t make two nickels.”) He wore a bushy beard, which he’d grown for an upcoming Guillermo del Toro film, “Nightmare Alley.” Production shut down in mid-March, but he had two days of shooting left, so he’d been stuck with the beard during the whole pandemic. “I can’t wait to shave it off,” he said, a sentiment for which Sharon expressed approval.
In quarantine, Jenkins has been playing (socially distanced) golf and puttering at home. “It’s like the movie ‘Marty’: ‘What do you feel like doing tonight?’ ‘I don’t know, what do you feel like doing tonight?’ ” he said. “Yesterday was our fifty-first anniversary, and we drove down to Narragansett. There’s a place called Aunt Carrie’s, but if you’re from Rhode Island it’s Ahnt Carrie’s. It’s this great seafood restaurant—”
“When you say ‘seafood,’ it sounds fancy,” Sharon said. “It’s chowder and clam cakes.”
“You can sit indoors, because all the windows are open and the sea breeze is blowing,” Jenkins continued. The beard has made him all the more anonymous, even in Rhode Island; sometimes, to Sharon’s dismay, he can’t even get them a table at a restaurant. “When Tom McCarthy cast me in ‘The Visitor,’ he said, ‘I want somebody who could walk down the streets of New York and not have people stop.’ As soon as he said that, a guy walked by and went, ‘Hey! Love your work!’ ” He laughed. “It’s pretty civilized. I’m just a guy who’s an actor who lives in Providence.” ♦
