CHRIS BAUER
You know Chris Bauer. He’s been getting so much work lately that he’s near ubiquitous.
Like a bad penny, he turns up everywhere. Or like dog shit; always around.
Two very old and out-of-date expressions, neither of which apply in today’s world. Pennies will soon be out of circulation, extinct if they’re not already and people almost always pick up after their dogs.
But Chris Bauer? He’s relevant. He applies.
And as for the pair of time-worn expressions, to look at his mug one might surmise that of the two, he’d be more inclined to unconditionally appreciate the latter. That’s because he has a real momzer face on him. What a puss. A scowling mien is perhaps a more apt description. His roles don’t call for a lot of smiling.
Chris Bauer has an uncanny knack for playing conflicted characters. Flawed human beings. He’s a natural.
Take Frank Sobotka, the Polish-American union leader, port-union boss and smuggler nonpareil — formally titled, the IBS Secretary/Treasurer, Baltimore docks division — in The Wire. The International Brotherhood of Stevedores and the docks’ longshoremen, small, big and bigger needed a real man in charge. A pater familias or the “father of the family.”
Frank’s job is to manage the finances of the union. Sounds pretty simple. Not so. Because to make sure that workers are taken care of in trying times — the local shipping industry is in decline and available hours are scarce — requires creativity, resilience and whatever else may be at hand.
Like becoming involved with an organized crime smuggling operation in order to finance a political campaign which hopefully will sustain the docks.
Then there was a starring role in Billy Crystal’s 2001 film 61*, an American sports drama focusing on the individual quests of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle to break Babe Ruth’s 1927 single-season home run record of 60 during the Yankees 1961 season.
Bauer played Bob Cerv, Maris’ roommate and a three-stint Yankee left fielder (1951-’56; 1960; and 1961-’62). Following the 1956 season Cerv was sold to the Kansas City Athletics for whom he had the best year of his career in ’58 when he hit .305 with 38 homers and 104 RBI. (This is particularly noteworthy only because that season Cerv was elected to the American League All-Star team, beating out Ted Williams for the starting left-field berth).
In the fateful ’61 campaign, Mantle’s off-the-field lifestyle begins to take its toll on him so much so that Maris and Cerv convinced “the Mick” to move in with them in a modest home they shared during the season in Queens. They were worried about him.
Bauer’s television credits run the gamut, a testament to his deftness and facility as an actor. Fred Yokas. Lead FBI Agent Dodd. Detective Lou Destefano. ‘Lee Nickel’. Brian Dempsey. Dr. Raymond “Ray” Galuski. Detective Andy Bellefleur. Dennis Halsey. Jimmy Flaherty. Det. Tom Lange. Bobby Dwyer.
His film appearances reflect the same sort of adroitness and it has become clear that Bauer has made and continues to make his bones in the Fantasy/Thriller genre with a healthy dollop of darkness mixed through.
Given the facts of the case it couldn’t be any other way. It’s that face, pure and simple.
Or is it?
Chris Bauer, a contributing member of the California state champion Miramonte High School (Orinda, CA.) Matador football team as a senior in 1983–1984, a student at the University of San Diego and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, became intimately familiar with blowing his brains out at a very tender age.
Fourteen to be precise.
That was when he took his first drink. “It was a slow-motion catastrophe,” he recalled. “I wasn’t just out of control, I was 100 percent off my path.” Bauer developed an obsession with alcohol quickly and upon reflection conceded that, “I think I abused it from the beginning. The idea of taking one drink for me was on par with aliens and Bigfoot. It was always more than one. I drank to change how I felt inside, and that’s basically a one-way ride to oblivion.”
Sober since he was forty — he is now 51 — the addictive bent which roiled inside and the behavior which cascaded from it remains clear as a bell to him, indelibly stamped in Bauer’s psyche. Alcohol. Weed. Cocaine.
“Think of me as the person at the salad bar,” he says. “I took whatever there was to offer.”
But it was the drink he considered his thick-as-thieves best friend. A bit of an education allowed him to make some sense of it all. “Alcoholism is extremely progressive,” he explained. “I went from being the life of the party to not being able to make it to the party. All my energy was going into covering how drunk I was, how hung over [sic] I was or how quickly I could get out of a situation so I could go have a drink.”
Functioning both at work and at home, albeit in a diminished fashion he could not or would not acknowledge, allowed Bauer to placate himself somewhat.
“I deluded myself for the longest time,” he admitted. “Like, if I was making them [his two young children] breakfast, how could I possibly have a problem?
But I realize that just because I put bacon and eggs on their plates doesn’t mean they were getting what they deserved from me.”
His moments of clarity arrived when he realized that he was drinking at work — to work — and coming home either unwilling or unable to be really there.
Physically he was there, but…
One day after doing a skit at a benefit for his theater company he recalled, “the next thing I remember, I was home, my tie was undone and my 5-year-old daughter was standing in front of me going, ‘What?’
That’s a really good memory for me to stay connected to…My purpose is to be a solid, present, protective guide for my children.”
And also to be around — legitimately around — for his wife who more than strongly suggested that one of them would be hitting the bricks unless or until Bauer changed it up.
So with the guidance of sober friends supplemented by exposure to the 12-step program, he pulled himself out of the black hole.
No rehab. His view could be encapsulated thusly: “It had to get so bad that my willingness to change had to override my obsession with drugs and alcohol.”
He has been clean for the past eleven years.
Chris Bauer is smart enough and humble enough to know that truth be told, he’s no big deal. Not close.
And in terms of self-assessment, he says, “I already feel I am in very dangerous territory and am really close to the transgression border, because my personal relationship to humility — meaning my point of view and my opinions and my thoughts and my connection to what I think is right — has never gotten me very far.
The life that works for me is the life of actions. It’s a very dicey thing to talk about, because all I have is today, and I want that to be clear. I’m not an expert on anything. Not even on my own life.”
With no fewer than 46 TV and Movie Credits to his name as an actor (to go with one Voice and one Guest Credit) Mark Christopher Bauer has made it big because of and in spite of himself.
8Mm’s Machine, The Devil’s Advocate’s Lloyd Gettys, Ivan Dubov in Face/Off, Frank Sobotka of The Wire, True Blood’s Andy Bellefleur, The Deuce’s Bobby Dwyer — and every other character this man with the mug-shot face, ‘the look’ has played — would agree.
Heartily. And humbly.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in December 2017.]
