No One Could Tee Up a Bullfrog Like Bill Cobbs

He built a career on wise, one-shot characters, and he made everything from Demolition Man to The Sopranos better because of it. Photo: Tim Boyles/Getty

Nobody lives forever, but Bill Cobbs’s passing at 90 still came as a surprise. His Einstein eyes and reedy voice made him seem like a timeless fount of wisdom when he was barely into his 40s. That aura only deepened as he aged.

Cobbs often played characters who exuded a quiet authority as well as a world-weary immunity from being hoodwinked: people who saw more and further than anyone else and whose knowledge was not always heeded. He stood out in stacked casts of The Bodyguard, Bird, The Color of Money (in which he tells Paul Newman’s pool hustler, Eddie Felson, truths no other man would dare utter); The Ghosts of Mississippi (as the haunted older brother of murdered civil-rights leader Medgar Evers); Demolition Man; The Hudsucker Proxy (which he also narrated); and Air Bud (as the coach who insists that there’s nothing in the rules that says a dog can’t play basketball). In terms of the sheer variety of roles offered to him, he could claim one of the most impressive careers of any Black character actor of the last half-century. He could be a frictionless addition to any ensemble, from science fiction and fantasy to down-and-dirty indie dramas and high-gloss Oscar bait. In 2006, Cobbs was cast as one third of a triumvirate of shifty old security guards in the Ben Stiller hit A Night at the Museum; the other two were Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, who’d been in movies for a combined total of 103 years by then. Cobbs was right at home, so assured on-camera that he seemed as if he had always existed and always would.

The Cleveland-born son of a construction worker, Cobbs entered the acting game fairly late by industry standards. He did eight years in the Air Force, mostly as a radio operator, then sold office products and cars. Cobbs was inspired to move to New York in 1970 when he was already 36 after having performed in Cleveland’s Karamu House Theater, the oldest continuously operating Black theater in the United States. In Manhattan, Cobbs joined the Negro Ensemble Theatre and acted in Purlie Victorious. He would continue to do stage work as he established himself in movies, understudying Joe Seneca in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and playing Hoke in a Chicago production of Driving Miss Daisy. He also had small roles in predominantly Black-cast films from the 1970s, including Cooley High, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (with Paul Winfield), and the car-racing biopic Greased Lightning (with Richard Pryor and Pam Grier).

Cobbs became an always-in-demand character actor after 1983’s Trading Places. John Landis cast him as an exasperated bartender who was surprised to see Eddie Murphy’s hustler Billy Ray show up in his joint again, flush with cash and generally behaving like what old movies used to call “a swell.” Murphy is the main show here; he always was in the 1980s. But watch what Cobbs does behind the bar as Billy Ray carries on, tossing 20s, cavorting with slinky women, and taunting men who could snap him like a toothpick. There’s a whole other story happening in Cobbs’s face: He’s unimpressed by the kid’s bravado and flashy duds, but is happy to take his money while he still has money to take. A year later, Cobbs popped as a barfly in John Sayles’s sci-fi 1984 race parable The Brother From Another Planet. His first line in closeup is like something an R. Crumb madman might mutter while glaring at a TV newscast: “You know what’s on them satellites come crashing down? Diseases. Diseases we ain’t even got a name for. Space germs.”

Cobbs started edging toward national-treasure status in the 1990s, thanks in part to his work as Lewis Coleman on the NBC civil-rights drama I’ll Fly Away, which lingered in the Nielsen ratings basement even as it made nearly every critic’s ten-best list and won two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, three Humanitas Prizes, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Peabody. It was canceled by NBC but finished out with a two-hour movie on PBS; Cobbs, who had been in his 20s during the era recreated by the show, believably incarnated a man from a much earlier time, someone who’d witnessed the Klan rampages of the Jim Crow era and had elder relatives who’d grown up in bondage. Cobbs was playing Lewis, but he was also playing the spirit of history, an authoritative voice from the past who made sure to distinguish between what was right and what was real (a distinction lost on the tragic main character of the wrap-up movie, a stand-in for Emmett Till).

At the same time that the brilliant I’ll Fly Away struggled to be seen by an indifferent home audience, Cobbs’s big-screen career delivered a series of high-profile roles in Hollywood blockbusters, many of them racially problematic. Cobbs made them work, usually by taking what might have seemed like an abstract or contrived character on paper and finding the emotional reality. The first role in this vein was was the outraged Harlemite in New Jack City, known only as Old Man, whose plea to the cops to do something about drug kingpin Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) fell on deaf ears; he tries twice to kill Nino and succeeds the second time in the stairwell of a courthouse where Nino once again wriggles free of punishment for his crimes. “Idolator!” the Old Man bellows. “Your soul is required in hell!” Though theoretically a descendant of 1970s blaxploitation thrillers like Superfly and gangster classics like Scarface (Nino obsessively re-watches the 1983 remake from his drug fortress–cum–bachelor mansion), the film owes more to right-wing cop flicks that are essentially vigilante fantasies with badges. The takeaway here, as in everything from The French Connection to the Dirty Harry and Lethal Weapon franchises, is that the law has tied the hands of police, and when the system fails, as it inevitably does, it’s up to individuals to get justice extralegally. Cobbs neatly sidesteps all of that by immersing us deep in the Old Man’s outrage on behalf of his broken and exploited community.

He was a key cast member in 1993’s Demolition Man, a typically reactionary action flick from Sylvester Stallone featuring Stallone as the ultimate cop and his repeat co-star Snipes as the ultimate street criminal who are both frozen in the ’90s and wake up in the future to continue their vendettas against each other. Cobbs plays Zachary Lamb, a one-time rookie cop who idolized Stallone’s John Spartan back in the 20th century and re-encountered him in the future at the edge of his own retirement; Cobbs gets to be, at the same time, a mentor and even surrogate father to Stallone’s loner brute, but also Spartan’s lifelong hype man, somebody who, like Spartan, is a relic from another time and understands (in that post-Reagan right-wing action-film way) that cops have to be brutal and break rules to fight crime effectively, and that the current top brass in the department is too soft to get it.

Cobbs’s role as Moses, the skyscraper clock-tender in the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy, is one of the ultimate Magical Negro roles of ’90s cinema — the character narrates the film in a retro-1940s kind of AAVE and is disconnected from all of the white characters at an everyday human level, yet knows every detail of their lives, tells the audience their stories, intervenes to save Tim Robbins’s dimwitted hero, and can literally manipulate time. The part turns the burgeoning subtext of Cobbs’s career into text: He’s the far-seeing wise man who isn’t listened to as often as he should be, because of his age and race or because folks just tend to be shortsighted and ignorant in that way. Sam Raimi, a childhood friend of the Coens, was the second unit director on Hudsucker, in charge of the large-scale miniature cityscapes as well as action and stunt sequences, including the scenes of characters falling from great heights through snow. Raimi was so enamored with Cobbs that he kept the memory of his performance in his back pocket and ended up casting him 20 years later in Oz the Great and Powerful as the Master Tinker, the mechanical genius who built the Tin Woodman.

After a certain point, Cobbs became known to TV producers as one of those acting commandos that you could book to play a small role that could add a new dimension to a story line. One of the earliest examples was a 1988 L.A. Law episode “The Belle of the Bald,” which had a B-plot about the prosecution of a man who clubbed a swan to death on a golf course. Cobbs had just one scene as a seasoned caddy who testifies about the accused’s temper, speaking of the time he watched the man hit a bullfrog whose croaking was ruining his putt. “He teed up a bullfrog” is one of those outrageous ‘80s TV-drama lines that probably killed during the table read. The way Cobbs delivers it, you can’t laugh, because the caddy says it like he’s reliving a moment that lowered the floor on human depravity, even though it was already subterranean.

After that, Cobbs had one-shot roles on the most notable TV dramas of their time. In the first season of Six Feet Under, he played Mr. Jones, a grieving widower who schools the restorative assistant Federico Diaz (Freddy Rodriguez) on the realities of aging and mortality as it relates to marriage while staring at the embalmed corpse of his beloved Hattie; Rodriguez’s eyes are red-rimmed and wet during this scene, as if he’d had trouble holding it together during earlier takes. In season six of The Sopranos, Cobb played the Reverend James Sr., father of the Reverend James Jr., an activist who protests a mob-controlled union at a construction site for failing to hire Black workers. Cobbs only has a few screen minutes with star James Gandoflini, including a walk and talk through Newark, but he makes such an impression (Gandolfini listens intently, like a student soaking up a beloved teacher’s knowledge) that when the character unexpectedly dies before the end of the episode, Tony is truly if unexpectedly moved when he offers the junior James his condolences. Star Trek: Enterprise cast Cobbs as Emory Erickson, the creator of the transporter, probably because Cobbs already had such gravitas by that point that viewers would take one look at him and think, Yes, I absolutely believe that this man could have invented such a device.

There’s no way that a Bill Cobbs completist could read this and not be irritated by the absence of a favorite role, because there were over 200, including five that haven’t been released yet. So here are a few: The People Under the Stairs, The Jeffersons, Block Party, Get Low, Lost, Enough, Agents of S.H.I.EL.D., and That Thing You Do (as the great Dell Paxton, whose legend precedes him, just as Cobbs’s did by that point in his career). The best way to honor his legacy would be to do something superlatively well without making a big deal of it.