Perfect 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 Saving Private Ryan, 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. All the tricks and mannerisms that Sizemore had been cultivating for his tough guy crime roles, his faintly sweaty and pop-eyed relish for action and violence, his disdain for the rulebook and streak of ruthlessness, all these character traits were reversed and redeemed and even ennobled by his persona as a dedicated military man.
He was a badass, sure, but now he was a badass for Uncle Sam, fighting the Nazis. Sizemore was the friend and confidant of Hanks’s thoughtful officer, and ready to pull a gun on any of his platoon who presumed to question his captain’s orders. Of that platoon: Jeremy Davies, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel, Edward Burns and Sizemore, perhaps it’s Vin Diesel who’s gone on to the movie big time, but at the time it was Sizemore who was the standout, because he had what he had never had before and was never really to have again – a heart of gold.
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. De Niro got him a part in Michael Mann’s mighty action epic Heat in 1995, playing Michael Cheritto, one of the crew working for De Niro’s Napoleon-of-crime super-thief, Neil McCauley. Sizemore was tough, grizzled, loyal and he looked the part, but he was always going to be upstaged by Al Pacino and De Niro.
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.
Ridley Scott’s cacophonous war movie Black Hawk Down in 2001 gave him another military role as the capable, cynical Lt Col Danny McKnight – but without the character-interest of those dialogue scenes with Hanks that he had in Saving Private Ryan. Sizemore was a casualty of the industry, a casualty of drugs, a casualty of the roaring 90s and it was a shame he couldn’t find a director to develop the gentler, sweeter side of his perfoming persona. But Saving Private Ryan wouldn’t have been as good without him.
