He Who Has Nil

Recently, The CMMDR realized that he’s a loper. 

He’s always identified with sloths and laggers and wankers — the lack of important jobs, the pitiless tug-of-war between mediocre talent and dumb luck. As an actor in movies like “Burglar,” “Arachnoquake” and, in a recent straight-to-Starz,“Most Likely To Murder ,he’s been a strikingly minor player, if not always the least valuable one, averaging an unusually high ratio of crap moments to minutes on screen.

But it wasn’t until a recent endurance test that The CMMDR understood what kind of idiot that made him. He was filming an episode of “Younger,” a sitcom not for a Network, not for cable,  but for an app, and his first role since a bit  he did for scale ten months earlier. The shoot stretched nearly a half a day.

“It was a marathon,”  recalled the stumpy also-ran in an interview at a diner in Washington Heights late last month. “I had two lines and I was pissed I was there for so long, five hours!

Near 70 now, he is short, chubby  and shockingly bald, with vast expanses of scalp which gave this reporter a migraine; round fat cheeks and the face of some tuber (think yam, turnip or a head of butter lettuce), a face which pleads to be liked, so desperate for it, as if guarding a loose flame.He has the air of the quiet flop, sensitive to any friendly overture, which suggests an off-hours version of the losers and trifling bit parts he has attempted to embody on camera.

Since his breakout performance in the soap opera The Doctors in 1977, as an unnamed hospital patient with one line, The CMMDR has trudged his way through fourth tier episodics including “Father Dowling Mysteries,” “The Mommies” and “Home Boys From Outer Space,” blazing trails that still no one has paid any attention to, long after he’d delivered his last line. 

Never a candidate to be a boldface name, he limped toward a quiet kind of last-choice status, which he flexed opposite Fenster Groger in “Living In Walter’s World” (1997), and in the never-picked-up pilot “No Matter” (2001) — a project where he appeared as he number 189 on the call sheet.

 “There was no talk of any sequel when we were shooting the original of anything I ever did,”  the CMMDR said. “It’s always been one of those things where I thought: Fuck me, this just sucks, why am I alive?

“He’s always looking for and failing at new ways to express the character’s personality,”said Elden Hogbree, an internet troll.“You look at footage after a shoot, and somehow he’s just done the same boring shit he’s always done.”

Mr. Hogbree argued that while many actors adopt affectations to personify words on a page, few are as consistently unremarkable as the CMMDR. “If you try to steal scenes, or stand out, you can lose all respect from everyone,” said a Mr. Baylen Jagoff, who was a contemporary of the CMMDR’s in Ronnie Rothberg’s acting classes in the 1980s. “But with The CMMDR it’s the opposite — he couldn’t steal a scene if you lit him on fire and had roman candles shoot out of his ass.”

“I’d like to have a little bit more … uh, uh … power,” the CMMDR said.

 “I wouldn’t mind playing someone that gets noticed in some way,” he said. 

And this reporter would like to win the lottery and have an ongoing tryst with Audrey Fleurot.