The indie film Any Day Now—directed by Eric Aronson—has come and gone. In March, the film, which imagined what happened to 13 paintings stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, had a short run in theaters.
But that wasn’t the end. Any Day Now has found a new life on streaming, primarily on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime. Aronson’s film is disarming, surprisingly warm, and inventive. It has a lot going for it, starting with its star, Paul Guilfoyle.
Guilfoyle, who is 76, has been “that guy from that movie” for about 50 years. You might know him from a whopping 14 seasons on the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, where he appeared in at least 317 episodes as the tough but wry Las Vegas police captain Jim Brass (and that’s not counting TV movies and spin-off appearances).
CSI paid the bills, but Guilfoyle had a satisfying movie and theater career before that. A kind of Boston-bred version of Bob Hoskins, Guilfoyle counts among his credits Oscar-winning films such as Spotlight, L.A. Confidential, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Wall Street. More recently, he played a loony Pentagon general in Adam McKay’s satire Don’t Look Up.
Guilfoyle has been in every show we ever liked. That includes recent roles in The Morning Show and Star Trek: Discovery, among others. And then there is his theater work. Guilfoyle has been one of Al Pacino’s favorite actors for almost five decades. As far back as 1979, he was chosen by Pacino for the Broadway production of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, followed by Richard III in the same year. He’s also worked with Pacino on his personal films, like Looking for Richard and The Local Stigmatic.
After all that, Any Day Now is the first film where Guilfoyle is the lead. He plays Marty, an offbeat, lifelong thief who gets involved in the scheme to steal those paintings. In real life, the high-end robbery took place 35 years ago, and no one has ever found the paintings. There’s only recent speculation about who engineered the theft. (Too late—the guys are dead.) Thirteen empty frames hang in the museum as a reminder of the well-executed heist.
Aronson, who was an unabashed CSI fan, thought of Guilfoyle to play Marty, an unconventional character that Aronson imagined could have been involved. Guilfoyle brings him vividly to life as gruffly engaging, even singing the Standells’ beloved Boston anthem, “Dirty Water,” in a dimly lit New Wave nightclub. It’s the kind of winning performance made for the Gotham or Independent Spirit Awards. Suddenly, at 76, Guilfoyle is a “find.”
He has hidden cachet: The lead guitarist of U2, the Edge, was a witness at his wedding, for example. How did that happen? Edge’s wife, Morleigh, was a dancer back in the day. So was Guilfoyle’s. He explains:
“And they’re doing a dance-company gala in Milan and Rome and all that, in the maybe early 90s, ’91. And Edge and I were like stage-door Johnnys. We were hanging around waiting for the dancers, Lisa and Morleigh, to get off. And they would go out to dinner. And Edge would come in. And I’d be coming in and out of some work I was doing.
“We were going to get married in Italy. So this is all happening in Italy. And Edge was one of the people, along with the other people in the company, who signed off on our wedding to get married.”
He has great stories. Jonathan Demme called him in for The Silence of the Lambs, but Guilfoyle didn’t like the part. He told Demme he’d already played a lot of fringe gangsters. Couldn’t he play Hannibal Lecter?, he asked. “Demme said, ‘We just made an offer to Gene Hackman.’” In the end, Anthony Hopkins got the part. “I don’t even think he knows that story,” Guilfoyle says.
When Guilfoyle started on CSI, in 2000, William Petersen was the star. Laurence Fishburne stepped in after Season Eight, and then came Ted Danson. Guilfoyle never thought he would stay on for so long. “I thought it might be over after the first nine episodes,” he says. “I accepted work in a movie in December 2000.” People came and went, but Guilfoyle was the steady anchor of the show until he was written out, in 2014. By the time he left, Brass was legally blind from Fuchs dystrophy, a corneal disorder.
“It became very fine-tuned, kind of like a sailboat,” he says of the series. “It had really good production values. And Jerry Bruckheimer, you know, added elements where he just got the best people to help.”
One of Guilfoyle’s favorite episodes was directed by Quentin Tarantino. “He actually brought cinema into our work, which, you know, no one else had time for it. We’d have magic-hour shots of driving the car, you know. I mean, he was really, you know, he’s an artist, and he just did what he did.”
So what’s next? Guilfoyle never stops working. He just finished a comedy directed by Jorma Taccone. It’s called Over Your Dead Body and stars Samara Weaving, Jason Segel, Timothy Olyphant, and Juliette Lewis—with Guilfoyle as Segel’s father. Not bad after 50 years.
Any Day Now is playing at Laemmle’s Monica Film Center, in Santa Monica, beginning August 22
Roger Friedman is the editor and chief correspondent of Showbiz411
