R.I.P. Nicky Katt, from Boiler Room and Dazed And Confused

Nicky Katt has died. A veteran character actor, Katt’s career was notable, among other things, for how frequently he worked with some of the biggest directors of his era, many of whom returned to him on multiple occasions to tap into his acerbic, daredevil energy. Steven Soderbergh, Robert Rodriguez, Christopher Nolan, and Richard Linklater all turned to Katt on multiple times to inject energy (and, frequently, menace) into their movies, starting with Linklater, who put Katt in memorable early roles in Dazed And Confused and SubUrbia. Katt’s death was confirmed today by TMZ. He was 54.

Originally a child actor, Katt popped up in films like Gremlins and The ‘Burbs when he was still a teenager, making Joe Dante the first of many directors to double-dip on his career. Post-childhood, he got his first big break in 1993, when Linklater cast him as the bully Clint Bruno in Dazed And Confused. Like many elements of the high school classic, Bruno is both a bit of a stereotype and a surprisingly vibrant character: Katt gives him an edge, with a genuine thirst for violence, that makes his attacks on Adam Goldberg’s Mike feel legitimately threatening. (Years later, Goldberg would cast Katt in a small part in his directorial debut, Hollywood thriller I Love Your Work.) Three years later—and after Katt had scored eye-catching roles as villains in films like Strange Days and A Time To Kill—Linklater cast him in one of the lead roles of SubUrbia, tapping in to the actor’s gifts for bitter laughs and roiling anger to play disaffected military vet Tim. (Opposite Giovanni Ribisi, with whom Katt would end up appearing in numerous films.)

1999 marked the start of a peak in Katt’s career: Steven Soderbergh cast him in a small, but highly memorable role in his crime thriller The Limey. (There was a lot of “small, but highly memorable” in Katt’s filmography.) Soderbergh would end up returning to Katt two more times: He put him front and center (as a bullying actor playing Hitler) in his 2002 comedy Full Frontal, and then in a smaller part in TV movie Behind The Candelabra. The same era also saw Katt appear (with Ribisi) in high-volume stock broker flick Boiler Room, for Nolan in his crime thriller Insomnia, and in one of the only regular TV gigs of his career: A three-season stint on David E. Kelley’s Boston Public. (The very nerdy part of us, meanwhile, is moved to note that this is also around when Katt did the sole bit of voice acting work of his career: A starring role in video game Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II, where he played a distinctive, darker-than-usual spin on franchise’s classic “scoundrel” type.)

Katt’s career lost momentum in the late 2000s, although he did connect with Robert Rodriguez (and through him, Quentin Tarantino) around the time of Sin City and Grindhouse. He largely disappeared from TV and film circa 2010, with Behind The Candelabra one of his final roles.

Interviews with Katt are fairly hard to come by, but an L.A. Times profile from 2002 catches him on the upswing, at a time when he was splitting his life between Hollywood and Austin. 32 at the time, he muses on desperation, cracks jokes about name-dropping, and projects a devil-may care attitude. “Sometimes I think if I did more sit-ups and went to the tanning salon, I could have a lot more power than I do now,” he wryly notes. “At the end of the day, you do what your gut tells you to do.” Soderbergh, meanwhile, chimes in with his own assessment of his frequent collaborator: “He’s absolutely fearless. No idea is too outrageous. He’ll try anything.”