In a career which often saw him play characters with a streak of ruthlessness, it was as a soldier with a heart of gold in Saving Private Ryan that he truly excelled
erfect casting is something that happens rarely in the career of any actor – starring or supporting – but it happened for Tom Sizemore in the late 90s, just as he was getting to be known for amoral tough guy roles, but also for drug abuse in his personal life. Steven Spielberg offered him the part of Sgt Mike Horvath in, and told him that he would be given a drug test at the end of every day of principal photography and his scenes would be re-shot with someone else if he failed even one.
Sizemore stayed clean and played the tough, beefy, courageous soldier who is to be the loyal subordinate of Capt John Miller, played by Tom Hanks, Miller being the high-school teacher in civilian life who in 1944 is entrusted with the almost hopeless, quixotic mission of rescuing a certain private in occupied France on compassionate grounds because all three of this man’s brothers had been killed in action.
As well as Spielberg, Sizemore had another important ally and friend: Robert De Niro, who would later be instrumental in forcing Sizemore to go to rehab: Sizemore had acted with De Niro in Irwin Winkler’s interesting and underrated Hollywood “red scare” movie Guilty By Suspicion in 1991, in which Sizemore played the bullying apparatchik of the House Un-American Activities Committee, based on Roy Cohn.
He had a more interesting bad guy role in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers in 1994, based on the story idea by the up-and-coming crime auteur Quentin Tarantino. Sizemore played Detective Jack Scagnetti, a sinister and obsessive cop on the killers’ trail with a personal reason for being obsessed, and one with a violent streak himself. It might have been interesting to see Sizemore cast in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs along with Michael Madsen and Chris Penn.
Sizemore carried off a lead role as a cop in the horror drama The Relic in 1997, opposite Penelope Ann Miller, a role once pencilled-in for Harrison Ford, who rather sunk the movie on declaring that he was not interested: Sizemore filled in at short notice and did his professional best with a movie which wasn’t a hit, but not the bomb everyone feared. But then the 90s were over and Sizemore’s career was on a downswing.
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