I must have noticed him before The Descendants. I know I’d seen him in The Black Hole, though that is one of those movies that rather slips out of my head as soon as I’ve seen it, and mostly what I remember from time to time is the awful robots. He did several movies I saw before I saw it, but that’s where I first really noticed him—and I am relieved to discover that would have pleased him, if he’d known. “If I can ever find a character where I get laughs, I hope that is the thing that endures. There’s nothing better than getting a laugh.” And my goodness but he made me laugh in The Descendants.

No, he wasn’t on the list; Wallflower helpfully wrote about him for me when I was on maternity leave two years ago. (Okay, so I took about a week and a half, but since I write articles in bed that often take me about half an hour, who needs more leave than that?) But every once in a while, I would think, “Yeah, but that wasn’t me writing, and he just seems so fun and so much fun to write about.” Especially when he took on the role of Sheriff Truman in Twin Peaks, when Michael Ontkean decided not to come out of retirement.

It seems the thing that frustrated him about his own career most was that he spent thirteen years playing villains. He didn’t like playing them, but when he took the role in The Delta Force, he didn’t have much of a career. It was take the job or don’t act, basically, and like most actors, he’d rather have taken a job he didn’t like than just not act. He credits Quentin Tarantino for pulling him out of that, which makes me a bit sad that Jackie Brown is the Tarantino film I’ve started and just not been able to finish at all—and I’ve given myself permission to just not watch his films anymore, so I’m not going to give it another chance.

But I’m comfortable with Sheriff Truman as his “wow, he was really capable of a lot” role, and not just because he got to spread it over the entire course of a TV show instead of having it confined to a single movie. As Frank Truman, he got to be more fully realized than any of the other movies I’ve seen him in; Frank was kind and gentle and angry and bewildered and awestruck by turns, the way any good “normal” Twin Peaks character is in the face of the weirdness that is Twin Peaks, and Forster handled the role with considerable skill.

And there is something awfully Lynchian about the fact that Forster is the son of an elephant trainer; allegedly, there’s a Barnum & Bailey poster on the wall of his Jackie Brown office in tribute to his father. (Though I’d have to watch the movie to be sure, I suppose.) And there is something so richly satisfying about his most memorable moment in The Descendants, where he punches the older daughter’s boyfriend. To be honest, I’m not sure I laughed then, more cheered. I think he would’ve been okay with that reaction, too.