Exploiting the Archives: Tough Guy Chronicles #1 Charles Napier

In a recent Big Whoop post, I wrote that one of the things that I adore about character actors is that they’re frequently amazing characters in real life as well. They’re larger-than-life personalities like Charles Napier, who I had the honor of interviewing not long before he died in 2011 at the age of 75. 

The project the septuagenarian character actor was, ridiculously enough, a horror sex comedy about a killer penis entitled One Eyed Monster co-starring Ron Jeremy. It was, to be brutally honest, not the most dignified project for an actor of Napier stature but then again, Napier was down for just about anything, and since he’d begun his career as one of Russ Meyer’s studs, it marked a return in some ways. 

Napier was full of amazing anecdotes that indelibly painted a picture, like when he said he came to Meyer’s attention because he was dating “some stripper” and when Meyer asked him whether he trusted him, Napier replied, in that wonderful tough-guy growl of his, “About as far as I can fuckin’ throw ya!” 

It’s one of my favorite Random Roles ever but I feel like I missed a golden opportunity when, late in the interview, he said that some people said he should write a memoir about his amazing life and incredible, iconic career and instead of immediately volunteering, “Me, me, me! I would love to ghost-write your memoir! Let’s make this happen! This is fate bringing us together!”, I let the moment pass and in a year or so later he was dead. 

But I will always treasure the time I got to spend a little bit of time with the man, and the incredible stories that flowed out of him and that I was lucky enough to capture for posterity. 

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