Oscars 2009: Meet the Nominees You’ve Never Heard Of

6. RICHARD JENKINS 
Best Actor Nominee
The Visitor

He might win an Oscar for … his turn as Walter Vale in The Visitor. He’s a widower who’s sleepwalking through life. He’s phoning it in as a tenured professor and procrastinating on his latest book. When he’s forced to go to New York for a conference, he discovers a young couple (Tarek and Zainab) living in his apartment – undocumented and victims of a real-estate scam, they have nowhere to turn, and Walter feels too guilty to kick them to the curb. Walter and Tarek become fast friends, sharing a love for music and African drumming, but everything comes to a screeching halt when Tarek is arrested and held for deportation. When his mother Hiam arrives to help, an unexpected romance blossoms. 
 
He holds his own … with critics like our own Pete Hammond who says, “He runs with it, taking Walter on a journey from indifference to humanity to rebirth. He’s alternately funny, serious, angry, driven, emotional and compassionate.”

You should know that … this award-season hubbub was a long time coming for Jenkins, probably best known for as the ghostly patriarch Nathaniel Fisher in Six Feet Under. He’d been the Everyman for a slew of directors — a favorite among notables like the Coen and Farrelly brothers — until he met The Visitor writer/director Tom McCarthy. So at 60 years old and after dozens of film and TV parts he finally got his leading role.

“I wrote this for him,” McCarthy tells USA Today. “The three other leads are actors from different countries, and I wanted someone who could disappear in the role. Not a big star, but someone with the chops to pull it off. As quiet as Richard is, there is always something going on behind his eyes.”

It’s that same set of chops, jump-started by studies at Wesleyan University, Indiana State University and coaching by Harold Guskin, that’s kept Jenkins employed since the ‘70s. He started with stage work at Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Theater before his comedic turns as a gay FBI agent on acid in Flirting with Disaster, a psychiatrist in Something About Mary and a gym manager in last year’s Burn After Reading.

McCarthy and Jenkins met up in L.A. a few years ago, merely acquaintances with a mutual agent. They happened to be staying at the same hotel, and when they ran into each other in the lobby they decided to go to dinner. “We went out and talked for an hour and a half,” Jenkins told IFC. “He sent me [a script] about a year later, and said ‘I wrote this movie and I want to know, will you do it?’ And I read it and I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You wrote this for me?’ I said, ‘But nobody’s going to finance this with me in the lead.’ And he said ‘That wasn’t my question. My question was ‘Do you want to do it?’ I’ll find the money.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And that’s how it happened.”

Never a Hollywood type (Jenkins only lived in L.A. for 10 months total during his entire career), the chance meeting set the duo on a path to make their low-budget character piece that the Academy just couldn’t ignore. Now he’s prepping for the Oscars (he’s taking his wife Sharon, son and sister-in-law) and told the Los Angeles Times, “I didn’t think I was going to be nominated. I was stunned and humbled, that’s the truth. It’s not something that was ever on my radar.”
 
He confessed … “I don’t know if 10 years ago I would have trusted myself enough as an actor to do what I did [with The Visitor],” Jenkins told Indie Wire. “To let it unfold and let it happen and not try and put anything on it. I always felt it was such an intimate story and such a personal story that it felt like window peeping. The audience should feel like they are looking in and that at some point someone in the movie is going to turn around and say ‘What are you looking at?’ I just thought it was that kind of intimacy.”

He’s unstoppable … with four upcoming flicks. First off there’s Waiting for Forever a comedy about a young man planning to live off his TV actress girlfriend. Second is Dear John a war movie about a soldier who returns to the army after 9/11, starring Channing Tatum. Then Joss Whedon’s new scare-fest Cabin in the Woods about a group of teens tricked into a trip into the forest. Last but not least, the film adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Rum Diary. Jenkins will star alongside Johnny Depp and Aaron Eckhart in the film about an alcoholic journalist who gets caught up in an affair with his friend’s girlfriend.