Impossible,’ Shea Whigham Built His Career the Only Way He Knew How — Brick by Brick

“I get asked that a lot,” Whigham says. “I never look at it like that. And sometimes I’ll say, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ Is Hackman a character actor? Is Duvall a character actor? If so, sign me up. I don’t put labels on it.”

Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall aren’t the only names that Whigham drops over the course of our conversation. It’s only a few seconds later that he’s marveling over how Meryl Streep’s range can take her from Sophie’s Choice to The Devil Wears Prada. Jack Nicholson and Gary Oldman come up a bit later, as does ’70s icon John Cazale, whose run that decade – in The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter – remains legendary. “He hung the moon, the stars, and the sun for me,” Whigham says of the actor, who made just those five films before dying young at 42.

So, while he may not be interested in having labels assigned to his career, it does quickly become apparent that Whigham knows exactly what type of actor he is and wants to continue to be – the kind who puts in the work to make each character he plays feel like a distinctly original creation meant to serve the story being told. The job may not always be an easy one, but it is one that Whigham understands clearly: “I always say: Move me. Move me to tears. Make me cry. Scare the hell out of me. Make me laugh. But move me. That’s all I’m ever trying to do with my characters.”

Choosing To Accept This ‘Mission’

Whigham, whose characters range from gruff to pensive to eccentric to a hundred different shades in between, is talking to me from his home library in Los Angeles. Behind him are books stacked on shelves in every which direction. His beard is starting to get a bit bushy, and his longish, gray hair rises up and sweeps backward before spilling over to the side. He wears a plaid button-down shirt, giving him an unassuming look that befits the workmanlike nature of how he goes about his job.

We connect over Zoom to talk about his 100-plus credit career, but the biggest topic at hand is this weekend’s release of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the eighth installment in Tom Cruise’s epic action franchise and the second movie in the series that Whigham appears in, following 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. The previous film introduced us to Whigham’s laser-focused government agent Jasper Briggs, who has been tasked with apprehending Cruise’s perpetually on-the-run superspy Ethan Hunt once and for all. (Describing Hunt, Briggs gets the best bit of dialogue in the movie, which he delivers in a tone that’s somehow both deadly serious and slightly mischievous: “He is not to be underestimated – a master of infiltration, deception, sabotage, and psych warfare. For all intents and purposes, ladies and gentlemen, a mind-reading, shapeshifting incarnation of chaos. So, for your safety and the safety of those around you, do not consider him secure unless you have driven a wooden stake through his open heart.”)

The chase continues in The Final Reckoning, which director, co-writer, and Mission: Impossible custodian Christopher McQuarrie originally designed to be the conclusion of a two-part story. Whigham teases that, in The Final Reckoning, we’ll learn a bit more about why Briggs seems so dead-set on tracking Hunt down.

The actor is no stranger to large action franchises, as he also appeared as FBI agent Michael Stasiak in three different entries in the Fast and Furious saga and played a major role in Kong: Skull Island, the best installment of Warner Bros.’s MonsterVerse series. And while Whigham seems thrilled to be co-starring in what might be the world’s biggest action series in Mission, it quickly becomes clear that it’s not the franchises themselves that interest him, but rather the people involved in making them.

When asked if Universal has called about him returning to the Fast and Furious universe for the upcoming, potentially final sequel, Whigham quickly answers that they haven’t and then adds unprovoked that he probably wouldn’t return anyway unless director Justin Lin, who steered the series to its highest highs and directed all three of the installments in which Whigham appeared, was coming back, as well. And when we chat about his two Mission: Impossibles, Whigham’s eyes light up the brightest when he talks about how committed Cruise is to making these movies as engaging as they can possibly be.

“We spent four and a half years together on these two projects, all in, so you really get to know him,” Whigham says of Cruise. “And the thing about Tom is that he and McQuarrie love cinema. People don’t really realize … they think, ‘Oh, Tom does all his stunts’ and all that. But he loves the idea of telling a great story. The reason these are getting better and better is because they demand great storytelling within these big set pieces. The thing about Tom or Brad Pitt or (Robert) De Niro … the great ones, they want you to be good in the piece. They’re not selfish. You do sometimes have some cats that you work with, and they may be saboteurs. They don’t want you to do that well … but not Tom. He wanted you to have your moment, and I’m forever grateful for that.”

With the full support of his director and high-profile co-star, Whigham insists his job is to approach his character from the inside out. So, when taking on the role of Briggs or anyone else he happens to be playing, the first thing he does is work out his character’s internal motivations: What’s his history? How did he get to the point where the audience is meeting him? Once Whigham is happy with the internal build of the character, he then moves to the external: What’s he look like? How much weight will he have to gain or lose for the role? This is a good time to point out that, yes, Whigham confirms that Briggs’ towering coiffure is indeed modeled after McQuarrie’s own height-increasing haircut. “With someone like Briggs, he is a character,” Whigham elaborates. “But you never want to go caricature. I always walk right up to that line with any character I play to see how far can we push him without going over into that cartoon or that caricature phase.”

Nailing the hair can definitely be part of that process. Whigham tells a story about working with Anthony Hopkins and peppering the Oscar-winning actor with questions about how he built the character of Hannibal Lecter for The Silence of the Lambs. (Whigham does this a lot – picking brains – when he gets to work with actors he admires.) Hopkins told him that he didn’t really find the character until they were three days away from filming, when the Welsh Thespian asked his hairdresser to try tightly combing his hair backward instead of brushing it forward. Voilà – there was Lecter, and the rest is history. Once you know your character’s motivations and you get his look locked down, Whigham says it’s all about finding as many different shades as you can and digging down as far as you can go.

“No matter the intensity of the character, you’re always looking for levity,” he explains. “Or, if it’s a funny piece, you’re always looking for where does (the character’s) humor lie or his seriousness lie. You put your miner hat on, you turn on the light, and you go on a deep dive – an excavation, for lack of a better analogy. And you go in as deep as you can, man.”

Going Broke Doing Theater and Catching a Break With ‘Tigerland’

Whigham was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1969, to an attorney father and school-librarian mother, and grew up 250-odd miles to the South in Lake Mary. (Shea excitedly exclaims that Lake Mary is now officially on the map because they won the Little League World Series last year.) His parents exposed him to movies at a young age, and he quickly became enamored with the stars of that era. “I think it started back sitting there watching old movies, as you do, with your parents,” he said, reminiscing. “I remember very early on watching Nicholson in (One Flew Over the) Cuckoo’s Nest. I remember being exposed to The Godfather, and my mother and father, and I sitting around talking about (Marlon) Brando. I remember my dad going, ‘You know, son, this is the greatest actor on the planet.’ What do I know? I didn’t know anything, but I know that I loved watching him. I think it started there. It started early on with just being exposed to film. I loved movies, and I loved actors.”

With an interest in acting growing as he got older, but no easy, obvious path into the business, Whigham, who says he was a shy kid, started searching for his own way in. He got into the State University of New York at Purchase (better known as SUNY Purchase), where he credits professors like Eulalie Noble and Dean Irby for essentially teaching him how to act. After college, he started a theater company with fellow SUNY Purchase graduate Kirk Acevedo. Their troupe put on plays by writers who would sell them the rights for cheap, not knowing how many people – if any – would show up to watch on any given night.

“You pound the pavement, you work hard, and it’s a battle of attrition,” Whigham says about those days. “How long can you hang in there? It’s like building a house. It’s brick by brick. You don’t start with the roof. Everybody nowadays wants to start with the roof. They want to go win a contest … or win a chef show and think they can be Gordon Ramsay. They don’t realize Gordon was toiling away and getting his ass kicked and handed to him in France for three years under the greatest chefs. For me, that’s the only way to do it – to get your ass handed to you.”

Though Whigham says he “went broke” with the theater company, he did eventually catch a break that would effectively launch his career when he got cast as a hotheaded and possibly unstable Army private in Joel Schumacher’s Tigerland, a 2000 war drama starring Colin Farrell. Looking back, Whigham says he was lucky to get the part and admits he probably should have been more scared than he was during the shoot. But Schumacher and his time spent on that set taught him a lot, and he made a friend in Farrell, who he’s about to work with for the third time on Season 2 of Apple TV+’s Sugar.

After Tigerland, he was off and running, often getting cast as either cop-type characters (police officers, government agents, soldiers, etc.) or law-breaking criminals. Whigham admits he can’t explain why so many directors and casting agents target him for those intense types of roles, but he says that he’s most interested in bringing shades of gray to his characters, no matter which side of the law they fall on. He just wants you to feel something for the person he’s portraying, regardless of whether he’s playing a cop on the take or a crook with a surprisingly strict moral code. Eventually, he winds up on the TV series that would truly make his name in the industry and introduce millions of HBO watchers to his work. But the path to getting cast was one full of twists, turns, and heartache.

Making It Big on ‘Boardwalk’

There is a good chance you first became fully aware of Shea Whigham when he co-starred on the hit series Boardwalk Empire for five seasons from 2010 to 2014. The show starred Steve Buscemi as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, the corrupt treasurer and de facto criminal ringmaster of Prohibition-era Atlantic City. Whigham played Nucky’s duplicitous younger brother, Elias “Eli” Thompson, the crooked county sheriff and family man who works by his own set of laws. Loosely based on the real-life escapades of Atlantic City crime boss “Nucky” Johnson, HBO drew up the series to serve as a sort of crime-drama successor to The Sopranos, which had ended its run three years prior. Boardwalk Empire was created by The Sopranos writer and producer Terrence Winter, and its $18 million pilot was directed by the legend himself, Martin Scorsese, who also executive-produced the series.

Whigham is well aware that Boardwalk Empire is where his career really took off. And how he ended up with the role is its own effective bit of drama that illustrates the highs and lows of being a working actor trying to make it in a tough industry. As he explains it, he had first auditioned for Scorsese for a completely different television show while shooting Tigerland. (Whigham typically refers to him as “Mr. Scorsese,” which certainly seems befitting the director of Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver.) Scorsese had seen early dailies of Tigerland and brought Whigham to New York to audition for a cop show he was working on.

“I go up there, and I read with Mr. Scorsese,” he recalls. “A couple of hours – myself and him. He’s reading with me in the room. For me, it was magical. I get the role. We go out that night. We have drinks. We have dinner. I tell all the boys down on Tigerland, ‘I got it!’ I’m weeping like a baby. I got it.”

Riding high, Whigham returned to the Tigerland shoot in Starke, Florida, where he was staying at a Days Inn. He noticed the “new message” light blinking on his hotel telephone. “And it’s a message from Mr. Scorsese. He says, ‘Kid, I don’t know what (happened), but the network’s not going to let me hire you.’” As quickly as the part was given, it was taken away. To call Whigham devastated would be an understatement. “I’m lying in the pool in the deep end after that.”

He says some good advice from his father convinced him to not hold any grudges over the ordeal, and, a decade later, he gets called back into audition for Scorsese again, this time to play a boat captain who only appears in the Boardwalk Empire pilot. “The casting director, Ellen Lewis, said, ‘I want you to read for Nucky’s brother, Eli,’” Whigham remembers. “And she said to Mr. Scorsese, ‘Hey, remember 10 years ago when you wanted to hire him? Guess what? You get the chance to now.’ And Marty always said to me, ‘The way you handled that and let me off the hook, kid, I never forgot that.’ Even now, it’s emotional for me. It kind of shows you: You stay humble, and you turn something (bad) into good.”

The punchline? The cop show he originally auditioned for never made it to broadcast, whereas Boardwalk Empire became the seminal experience of the actor’s career. Whigham says playing Eli changed his life, turning him from an actor who still sometimes had to wait tables and serve coffee in between jobs to a bankable performer. He reunited with Michael Shannon, who briefly appears in Tigerland, solidifying a lifelong friendship between the two (more on their relationship in a bit), and discovered that he now had doors open to him that previously he had only dreamed about. Before Boardwalk Empire had even ended, he found himself again summoned by Scorsese to appear in a small but memorable scene as Leonardo DiCaprio’s private boat captain in 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “You get kind of summoned by the king,” Whigham says, chuckling.

It’s been a bit over a decade since Boardwalk Empire ended its run, but, in addition to all his movie work, Whigham has continued serving as a regular presence on some of the best shows television has to offer: An episode of Justified. Five episodes of Fargo. Two remarkable episodes of the groundbreaking first season of True Detective. Two episodes of Narcos. A seven-episode run on the Marvel series Agent Carter. Eight episodes of Homecoming, for which he was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama. More award nominations for playing Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy in Gaslit.

If we did want to make a case for Whigham being a Hall of Fame “that guy,” it’s his appearances on so many broadly beloved shows that likely provide the strongest argument. Heck, he even appeared in three episodes of ER before he ended up on Boardwalk. Whigham says he loves television and appreciates the opportunities it provides to flesh out a character across multiple episodes in ways that you can’t do in a two-hour movie. He’s fine with playing a lead or with taking a smaller role in a series telling a story he believes in. “There’s no rhyme or reason for me,” he says. “It’s about the story, and it’s about the character.”

Getting to Play With Danny McBride and His Troupe

Or, occasionally, it’s about having some laughs with an old friend, as Whigham has now also found himself a regular member of Danny McBride’s South Carolina-based troupe of goofballs, rascals, and rabble-rousers. Whigham has been close friends with McBride since they starred together in David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls in 2003. In the years since, McBride, Green, and their colleague, Jody Hill, have become a triple-headed comedic force of nature, blessing the world with the immaculate three-show run of Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones, the latter of which just wrapped up over on HBO.

Whigham got asked to come and play for Vice Principals, where he starred as Ray Liptrapp, the laid-back new husband of the ex-wife of McBride’s beleaguered high-school educator. The role was originally written to have more of a snarky edge, but Whigham convinced McBride that Ray should be “all about love.” McBride and company decided to end the series after two seasons. But once you’re in McBride’s orbit, it’s tough to get out of it, so Whigham found himself called back to duty for Gemstones, where he assumed the role of a 70-something ex-stock-car driver who’s dying of cancer.

“I’m lucky enough that they write something like Vice Principals, and I get a chance to go in and craft that character for them,” Whigham says, noting that he’ll do anything McBride asks him to do. “It’s no coincidence how good their stuff is. I’ll say this on record: For Danny McBride to write, direct, produce, and star in – and never be awarded … you tell me … I don’t know anything about awards, but how can that guy not get nominated? The amount of hats he has to wear. He’s got more creativity in his pinky finger than, let’s just say, a lot of people.”

Whigham is not wrong, and we spend some time chatting about the incredible fourth-season premiere of The Righteous Gemstones, which jettisoned the show’s regular cast to tell a story about a Civil War-era criminal-turned-preacher played by Bradley Cooper. (“Were you not gobsmacked, shocked at what you saw?” Whigham asks me. I agree that I was.) Whigham is convinced that McBride will soon be doing film work that critics will be taking very seriously. He’s probably not wrong there, either.

A Surprising Death in ‘Kong: Skull Island’

Whigham likes doing comedy because he says the best comedy, like the kind McBride does, comes from truth. He points to his role in 2011’s The Lincoln Lawyer, where he has three scenes as a prison informant, as one of his favorite more-comedic roles. He’s perhaps a little less enamored with the laughs he gets for his spectacular death in Kong: Skull Island, a deliciously dark bit of comedy that, as it turns out, Whigham didn’t have much to do with. In the scene, his U.S. Army captain decides to sacrifice himself to save his fellow soldiers by running at one of the film’s giant, lizard-like monsters with a live grenade in each hand.

As originally shot, he throws the hand grenades in the monster’s mouth and saves the day. Whigham tells me he was playing the scene dead straight, like he was in Full Metal Jacket. But thanks to some digital FX trickery, the scene ended up playing out differently in the finished film. Instead, the monster whips its tail around, hilariously sending a charging Whigham flying into a nearby mountainside where he explodes upon impact. “I go see it,” he says, laughing. “I’m sitting there, and the tail whips me into the mountain. And I go to the director, and I’m saying to him, ‘Hey man …’ But then my kids are like, ‘Pop, 100 million people have viewed that thing!’”

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Ultimately, he says shooting Kong in Hawaii, Australia, and Vietnam was a magical experience, and that people still stop him in the airport to tell him what a great death he had in it. “But, yeah,” he adds. “Let’s just say (that scene) didn’t go the way I thought it was going to go.”

Finding Kinship With Co-Stars

When you’re a consistently working actor in Hollywood, Whigham says you start to assemble a collection of like-minded actors who you get along with, who work the way you do, and who you can’t wait to work with again. This likely explains why he’s worked with Shannon, by my count, a whopping nine times, including in 2011’s Take Shelter, 2020’s The Quarry, and on the upcoming Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning.

“We were just talking about this,” Whigham says of his buddy Shannon. “We don’t know what it is. You can’t force chemistry, you know what I mean? You can’t force it in a relationship when you meet someone – whether it’s a friendship or a relationship. And you can’t do it on screen either. It happens organically.” He says he respects Shannon’s hard work ethic, but they also make each other laugh a ton when they’re on set together.

And Shannon isn’t the only one Whigham feels like he’s forged a strong bond with. Farrell comes up repeatedly during our conversation. I bring up the fact that he’s also appeared in multiple projects with Frank Grillo (Pride and Glory, Wheelman, The Gateway), who he says kind things about before also mentioning Carrie Coon (Lake George, Fargo) and Betty Gilpin (Gaslit, American Primeval) as two actors he loves working with.

“My big litmus test is: Do I miss people when I’m not around them?” he says about his favorite co-stars. “That’s kind of real basic, and I do – I miss all of these people. And so then you get a chance to come together and create.” We talk about how some, like Farrell, were overnight sensations, while others had to toil away at it for a while before getting the recognition they deserve. Whigham says, for him, there’s no greater joy than to see these actors he feels he has a personal kinship with find success and get recognized for their work. “And they’re all having their moments now!” he adds excitedly.

Whigham found it immensely satisfying to reteam with Coon on the quirky crime thriller Lake George and jumped at the chance to work with Farrell again on Sugar. “As I move through this and get older, I’m able to be a little more picky,” he says. “If it’s going to take me away from everything that I know and love family-wise, then, man, it better be good. It better be worth it. And that can be a small project like Lake George, which was so gratifying, or it can be as huge as Mission: Impossible, where you get someone like Tom. I would put Tom in that same category of generosity. Look, it’s no secret: Number one on the call sheet dictates everything. If they’re a great human being and a great artist, I’ll have guns, will travel. I’ll go anywhere with them. I’ll go to the ends of the Earth with Tom and Mission, or I’ll go all the way through California with Carrie.”

On ‘Mission: Impossible’ and Adventures to Come

Ah, yes, back to Mission: Impossible. And while Whigham is being metaphorical about going to the ends of the Earth with Tom Cruise, he’s also being somewhat literal. “It’s the greatest gig you can possibly have,” he says of the experience. “You’re seeing the world. You’re in Venice, Italy or Rome or South Africa. And you give up a lot to do them. You may miss birthdays. I spent two Thanksgivings with Tom and McQ and the crew, but it’s all worth it. ‘Cause that’s all you want at the end of the day – you want an experience, man. You want to have an experience. And I did on these.”

There will be more experiences to come. Later this year, audiences will see him in F1 with Brad Pitt. Whigham says he does a “small pop in” in that one, playing the head of a team that Pitt’s character races for early in the film. He says that Pitt, like Cruise, is someone he’s always wanted to work with, so the movie allowed Whigham to finally cross him off a mental list he keeps. That list includes both actors and directors. He’d love to do something with the Coen Brothers “if they don’t retire.”

Getting the call from either Paul Thomas Anderson or David Fincher would thrill him to no end. He also doesn’t rule out a return to the stage, especially if he could tackle a Sam Shepherd play, but he admits the long theater runs on the other side of the country make it difficult. Whigham says he’s too big of a self-critic to do any writing. He would like to direct – and almost did on Boardwalk Empire before its final season got cut short – but the right project hasn’t come along yet.

Until that happens, he’ll focus on just being an actor. And not a character actor or any other type of label you want to put on it. Just an actor. As the interview winds down, we chat about Small Engine Repair and Take Shelter – smaller films of his that he takes a lot of pride in. He’s happy to know they’re still being watched and discovered. Talk turns to Cazale, that improbable five-film run he had before his untimely death, and how much inspiration Whigham still draws from it. “Those five films that he did and the way (that he did them) – that’s it for me,” Whigham says. “That’s what you want to do, and you want to do it for life.”

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is now in theaters.

Photography: Hamish Robertson | Styling: Brooke Llewellyn | Grooming: Andrea Pezillo | Location: Los Angeles