Brad Pitt’s Old-Man Body Slept Here

[January 14th, 2009]

When Tom Everett spots me walking toward his table at Starbucks, the actor now starring (sort of) in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button removes his wire-rimmed glasses, replaces them with tortoiseshell-framed spectacles, and formally shakes my hand, mumbling: “A pleasure to meet you, young man.”

It takes several awkward seconds for me to realize this is supposed to be an impression of Benjamin Button. It is, frankly, a terrible impression of Benjamin Button.

Yet without Tom Everett, there wouldn’t be a Ben Button—at least not in the form that appears in David Fincher’s acclaimed movie. In fact, if Brad Pitt manages to snag an Oscar for his performance as a man who ages backward from a decrepit geriatric to a fresh-faced child, he should by all rights share the lower two-thirds of the statuette with three other actors: Peter Badalamenti, Robert Towers and the Portland native, Everett.

Countless men dream of having Brad Pitt’s body. Everett has been Brad Pitt’s body. In one of the most advanced and detailed exhibitions of movie special effects yet seen, technicians at the Los Angeles studio Digital Design matched Pitt’s facial expressions to a computer-generated old-man head, which they digitally placed atop the bodies of Badalamenti, Towers and Everett, who performed the scenes in 2006 and 2007 with blue bandanas wrapped around their heads. These “CG head-replacement shots,” as the industry magazine Cinefex termed them this month, mean that for about five minutes of Benjamin Button’s onscreen life—from the moment he leaves his mother’s home to his contemplative reading of a letter aboard a tugboat bound for Russia—his characterization literally rests on Everett’s shoulders.

Everett, a 60-year-old Jesuit High School and Whitman College alum who moved to L.A. in 1982, admits that his contribution to Benjamin Button hinges on “technology which I don’t quite understand.” But he takes great pains to note that he is no mere body double (like Forest Grove resident Audrey Walker, who last year stood in for Diane Lane’s shower scenes in Untraceable). Instead, for the first third of the movie he and his co-stars supply the entire physical side of the character. “Unless these people are good,” he says, “it’s going to make [Pitt] look bad.” (Fincher confirmed as much to Cinefex: “It was amazing to discover the repercussions that the gross body movement had on the performance of the face,” the director said. “But if it was off even by a frame, it looked freakish.”)

A journeyman character actor, Everett has gotten regular face time in movies and television for more than 30 years. “I play a lot of different [roles],” he says, “from corporate to Southern to sleaze.” He also plays shot: His most famous role was in Air Force One, where his officious national security adviser was the first hostage executed by Russian terrorists. Onstage, “I’ve played Hamlet, I’ve played Edmund in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. These are highlights nobody saw.”

His mother and sisters still live in Portland, and he hopes to return for good sometime next decade; between acting gigs, he has recorded a country album for RCA called Porchlight on in Oregon. For now, Everett is enjoying the fruits of the Benjamin Button awards run—including introducing his star-struck 13-year-old daughter to Pitt and telling glowing stories about everyone he’s worked with, especially Fincher. “He’s a great guy, and I’d certainly love to work with him with my own face.”