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What’s in a name? Would Axl Rose, by any other, sound so sweet? Having a slightly unusual moniker can be advantageous in a highly populated
industry where every little difference helps to establish a unique selling point.
It wasn't always this way. John Wayne clearly doubted he could have made it as an iconic western hero if he'd stuck with the name he was born with, Marion Morrison. And Archibald Leach was presumably advised that his simply did not convey the same laid back chic as his eventual choice, Cary Grant.
But audiences have grown used to more unusual or exotic star names - from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Renée Zellweger - so there was surely little thought given to alternatives by character player on the cusp of stardom Timothy Olyphant.
The man who gave Bruce Willis a run for his money in Die Hard 4.0 earlier this year, who scored a success on the small screen with Deadwood and who has been acting in movies - and stealing scenes from more established performers - since the mid 1990s takes the lead in Hitman.
An action film based on a popular video game, it is the kind of high concept hybrid that favours the incredible over the credible and casts Olyphant as a ruthless and unemotional assassin for hire. If it takes off at the box office it could cast him into a higher orbit still, and he is shrewd enough to understand this.
"My wife told me something my daughter said recently," he recounts, with that characteristic Cheshire cat grin, "she said 'Dad's almost famous'. So even she has some understanding of what comes with this job. But I've said for the last few years that right now, this is probably as good as it gets. I do not get recognised, I can walk in and out of this hotel and the paparazzi don't lift up their cameras - God bless them - and I don't look forward to the day when they do.
"The only subtle change I've seen is sometimes after I've gone by one of them does a double take. There's a little bit of that. So to be able to be in these kind of projects, to be able to be in a show like Deadwood and to be able to shoot an independent film as I am at the moment and to be able to shoot a film like Hitman or Die Hard, and travel internationally while remaining fairly anonymous - I count my blessings."
Olyphant is too modest to talk his success up, too realistic to accept it as his by right and too cautious to consider that his current run of good form will last. The last few years have been a dizzying journey for the actor, attended by a kind of hysterical craziness that he has already glimpsed at close quarters.
"I was introduced to that within a day or two after being offered this job," he recalls. "It really is quite mind boggling. I got a call on the Friday evening saying I'd been offered the role of Hitman, and they were sending me the script.
"This was the end of Friday, I didn't return the phone call, I just went about my weekend and on the Monday morning, early, I met a guy who was a professional hockey player. I'd never met him before in my life, and he says as I was introduced to him 'oh, I hear you just stole this job from Vin Diesel'.
"I asked if he was friends with someone at the studio, and he said no, he'd read it that morning. So I went home a few hours later. I saw my wife and she said she was dropping the kids off at school and someone said to her 'I hear your husband's going to be the
Hitman. We were both having the same reaction, we knew what they were talking about but we don’t know why.
"So we googled my name and dozens of headlines, on various websites that I've never heard of, reporting exactly what they were saying to us. And the odd thing is there's truth to it but I hadn't returned the phone call to say I'd do it. It's crazy! You learn pretty quickly that all of this may not be what it seems."
Wise words from Timothy Olyphant - a name worth remembering.
ANWAR BRETT
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