In the wake of the passing of acclaimed character actor Mark Margolis at age 83, we’re taking a look back at his body of work, and some of his most memorable performances. Here’s a selection of some of the best in a career spanning over 40 years.
Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul
“Ding.”
It’s a testament – and not a particularly fresh one – to Mark Margolis’s talent that he managed to steal every scene he had in Breaking Bad despite spending the majority of them mute, seated, and only moving one finger.
“Tio” Hector Salamanca was a haunting character. Revealed through his Better Call Saul prologue to have been paralyzed by a botched assassination attempt, he somehow becomes more terrifying from the confines of a wheelchair than he was as a fully ambulatory crime boss. He’s a man possessed of terrible will, performed with surgical precision.
Scarface
Margolis got a relatively late-in-life start as an on-screen presence, and he was already in his 40s when he popped up as Alberto the Shadow in the 1983 classic Scarface. 40 years later, the scene where he and Al Pacino’s Tony Montana go to ruin a family’s day with about a baked potato’s worth of C4 remains the place to go if you want to make your friends say “hey, isn’t that Tuco’s uncle?”
Almost everything Darren Aronofsky ever made
It started with Pi, the 1998 feature film debut of acclaimed weirdo Darren Aronofsky, in which Mark Margolis appears as Sol, a mathematics enthusiast in the middle of a bad run of cardiovascular episodes. The actor/director comradery seemed to stick, and Margolis went on to appear in Aronofsky’s next five films: Requiem for a Dream in 2000, The Fountain in 2006, The Wrestler in 2008, 2010’s Black Swan, and in a voice-only role in Noah in 2014. Either by design or providence, he managed to dodge Mother!
Oz
Another in a series of ill-fated drug lords played by Mark Margolis, Antonio Nappa jumped into the drama of HBO’s Oz on the back nine of the second season. He made it through 10 gruesome episodes as a member of the prison’s kitchen staff and leader of the Sicilians before coming to a fittingly chilling end in Unit E at the hands of a fellow criminal. Margolis did a lot of that sort of thing, and he did it well.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek has always been a premier destination for beloved actors to go to spend a week creating enduring work with rubber glued to their foreheads. In season three of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Margolis joined this noble fraternity, playing frustrated scientist Nel Apgar in the episode “A Matter of Perspective.” Following in the footsteps of Trek stories like “Measure of a Man” and paving the way for future legal-dramas-in-space like “The Drumhead,” it’s a story that, like all good Star Trek, still sends excited viewers down conversational rabbit holes to this day.