Charles Rocket

Before he was a character actor with two genuine cult-film credits to his name, Charles Rocket was a *Saturday Night Live* cast member — and his time there ended badly. A live on-air expletive during a 1981 broadcast led to his dismissal from the show (Wikipedia). It's the kind of moment that follows a performer forever, and for a while it probably did. But Rocket didn't disappear. He kept working, cycling through television and film roles across the 1980s and into the 1990s, building the kind of quiet résumé that doesn't generate headlines but does generate a career. The two roles that cemented his place in the pop-culture memory came back to back. In 1993, he played Dave Dennison in Disney's *Hocus Pocus* — the dad trying to protect his kids from three resurrected witches, grounded and a little bewildered, which was exactly the right register for that film (Wikipedia). Then in 1994 came *Dumb and Dumber* and the role of Nicholas Andre, the villain of the piece — smooth, calculating, and weirdly watchable in a film otherwise dominated by Jim Carrey's physical comedy (Wikipedia). Rocket's Andre isn't playing for laughs the way Carrey is, and that restraint is what makes the character work. He's the straight line the jokes bounce off of, and he plays it with a kind of coiled menace that's easy to underestimate. He continued working in television and film through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, accumulating guest appearances and supporting roles that demonstrated real range across genres (Wikipedia). He performed under multiple stage names throughout his career — Charlie Hamburger, Charlie Kennedy, and Charles Rocket — suggesting a performer who was always, in some sense, reinventing his professional identity (Wikipedia). He died on October 7, 2005, at 56 (TMDB), leaving behind a filmography that rewards anyone willing to look past the SNL footnote.