Clancy Brown (Rory Lewis Photographer 2026) Los Angeles Photographer Rory Lewis
Last week Clancy Brown came to the Downtown Los Angeles studio, and I finally had the chance to build a picture I have been carrying around in my head for some time: a man at a table, with bread and wine and fruit in front of him, lit the way the Old Masters lit their suppers.
The arrangement owes a debt to two traditions. The first is Caravaggio, whose Supper at Emmaus pushes a basket of fruit so far to the edge of the table that it looks ready to fall into the room. The second is the Dutch painters of the century that followed, who built whole careers out of a torn loaf, a pewter plate and a half-empty glass against a dark ground. Ours was a Californian version: persimmons, pears and heirloom tomatoes in a wooden bowl, a dragon fruit cut open, a dark loaf, an old silver plate, a glass of red and a bottle with no label on it, so that nothing in the frame gives away the year.
Then there is the face. Clancy has spent four decades giving cinema some of its most memorable villains, Captain Hadley in The Shawshank Redemption and the Kurgan in Highlander among them, and lending his voice to characters known to millions who have never seen him. In person, the white hair and beard put me in mind of Ribera's philosophers, and that was the register I wanted: someone thinking rather than someone performing. Dressed in black against a black ground, only his face and hands take the light, which is exactly how the seventeenth century would have had it.
Clancy Brown (Rory Lewis Photographer 2026) Los Angeles Photographer Rory Lewis
Two frames from the table say most of what I hoped they would. In the first, his chin rests on his hand and his eyes are somewhere else entirely, the food and wine untouched, a man in the middle of a thought. In the second he looks straight down the lens, fingertips resting on a cut tomato, with the flicker of mischief that has made his villains so watchable for so long. Same table, same light, two different pictures. The set stays put; everything that matters happens in the seconds before the shutter.
Clancy Brown (Rory Lewis Photographer 2026) Los Angeles Photographer Rory Lewis