William Earl Brown (born September 7, 1963) is an American character actor who has appeared in many mainstream film and television projects. He is perhaps best known as Dan Dority on the HBO series Deadwood. He is also well known for playing Warren in the 1998 film There's Something About Mary and Kenny the Cameraman in Scream. More recently, he voiced the character Bill in Naughty Dog's 2013 survival horror action video game The Last of Us.
The Theatre School at DePaul University (1989), Murray State University (1986), Calloway County High School
Spouse
Carrie Paschall (m. 1989)
Nominations
Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series
Star Sign
Virgo
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Quote
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(2010 -- on landing New Nightmare and working with Wes Craven) When I went out to L.A. from Chicago to test the waters, I got a TV pilot within two weeks of being there. It was a guest star, but they were going to make me a regular if it got picked up. We went to New Orleans and did it, and then I go back to L.A. and I get a TV movie-like three, four scenes, but a decent job. So I called my wife up: "We gotta move here. This is fucking easy." So then we did move, and it was seven months of nothing. Like, nothing. No auditions, nothing. And I start to second-guess. We left all of our friends. Our family was a 400-mile journey, but still nearby. Suddenly we're on the other side of the country. Well, I get a call. The casting director that did the pilot wanted me to come in. He was doing a new Wes Craven movie. I thought the first Nightmare On Elm Street was brilliant, and I thought the sequels were horrible. They kind of ruined the first one. After about the third or fourth one, you know, "wisecracking Freddy." I didn't know that Wes executive-produced the third one, Dream Warriors, but he didn't have anything to do creatively with what happened with that franchise. So I go in, and it says Nightmare 7 on the doors. I'm like, "I don't want to be in this." But I needed the money. I didn't throw the audition, but it wasn't anything special. Then I go do my background research and find out that Wes didn't do those [sequels]. And then I was eager, because I did think the script was very witty. Then Wes and I just hit it off personally, and he brought me back with Vampire In Brooklyn and gave me his home number, which is what led to Scream. I haven't seen him in a few years. We used to have lunch every three or four months and catch up. He was the first person that was like an established Hollywood guy-even though he's the antithesis of a Hollywood guy as a personality-but he was the first really established person in the business that took me under his wing, and I'll always be grateful, because it gave me more of a sense of, "Well, this guy keeps using me and he believes in me. And if he's in, then I must belong here."
2
(On The Big White) That movie deserved better than it got...It barely got released. It was a great adventure, though. We hung out in Skagway, Alaska, where all the tourists come in. During the winter there's only about 400 people there. Well, they opened up for us early. We were shooting up on the glaciers, like right over into Canada. We got to go helicoptering, I snow-shoed through the Tongass Forest. They took me on a helicopter down the face of-I forget what glacier-but literally we're 10 feet away from this glacier going down. We had all these really, really cool life experiences. And when we shot at night, it was absolutely sheer fucking misery. It was so cold.
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(On landing There's Something About Mary) You know, you do this so long, and you get so much fucking rejection. And even when you get accepted, still there's a caveat that you might get dumped. That was just one of those kismet things. I worked out at the gym with Lin Shaye. Gary Ushino was a camera assistant who had shot Scream and New Nightmare and Vampire In Brooklyn. Gary had been hired out for this miniseries I was doing called Bella Mafia, where Jennifer Tilly was my wife. We started making fun of the script, playing it tongue in cheek. The director loved it, because it gave some levity to the seriousness. I don't want to say that we became the clowns, but our relationship was a little different. One day Gary goes, "Man, you're funny! I've never seen you do comedy. I'm doing this new Farrelly Brothers movie. It's called There's Something About Mary. It's the funniest thing I've ever read." At the gym that weekend, I'm on the Stairmaster next to Lin Shaye. "So what are you doing now?" She said, "Have you seen Dumb And Dumber?" I said, "Of course I did." She said, "The Farrelly Brothers are doing this new movie. It's called There's Something About Mary. It's the funniest thing I've ever read." So I tracked the script down. Rob Moran and I, we were part of this improv group that would meet informally at Amy Pietz's place on Sundays. I kept thinking I knew Rob from Chicago. I couldn't place how I knew him. Well, I'm re-watching Dumb And Dumber and Kingpin, and that's the dude. That's Rob. So the following Sunday I said, "I finally figured out how I know you"-we'd been working together for two months-"You're Stanley, the evil bowler in Kingpin." He goes, "Yeah, and I'm in Dumb And Dumber." I said, "So you know the Farrellys." He said, "Yeah, known them since I was a teenager. I'm from Rhode Island." I said, "I'm trying to get in on Mary." He said, "Warren? Are you interested in playing Warren? 'Cause they can't find anybody. They've seen dozens if not hundreds of people." He calls Bobby [Farrelly], and two days later I'm in there. I was the only person to play it straight. They were bringing in comics. Chris Farley was one of them-Chris died while we were shooting the movie. The studio wanted a name and a face. The Farrellys' argument was the audience has to believe he's retarded. No matter how good somebody might be, it's Chris Farley playing retarded. Of course, Chris was uninsurable at that point, anyway. At the callback there were four people, and they were all stand-ups except me. I could hear them in the room and I just knew, that's not the way. Because I played it straight, that's why it was funny. You couldn't goof on that and amp it up to play funny, because it was a commentary on the character instead of being honest. So that was how it came about. It was the last time I think I was giddily excited when I left. I remember in the elevator afterward I was like, "Fuck yeah!" That's not happened to me since. And shooting it was an absolute joy. The two really good studio films that I've been involved with on some level were Scream and Mary. But they were both low-budget for studios, they were under the radar, nobody was paying attention, they were gonna be essentially a modern-day B-movie. And both of them were this incredible, fun experience, and both of them became what they became. I was very fond of saying in the late '90s, "You know, in the mid-'90s there's two movies that came absolutely out of nowhere and changed horror movies and changed comedies, and now everyone's impersonating both of them-Scream and Mary-and what did they have in common?" [Points to himself.] But did that catapult me to great big paychecks? No.
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On playing "Warren" in There's Something About Mary (1998): "The character was retarded - he wasn't an idiot. Of all the idiots I've known in my life, none of them were retarded."
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Fact
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Spent his childhood summers at Redd Hollow in Land Between the Lakes (LBL). He could always be found swimming off the boat ramp there. LBL was a recreation area that the government annexed and moved Earl's family to Calloway County, Kentucky.
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Earl started the band "Sacred Cowboys" with Peter Spirer (the director of "Dunsmore"), Jeff Robertson, Stephen Quadros, Tony Cavazo, Ralph Stevens, and Mike "Rhinestone" Johnstone (who he met on the set of "Deadwood").
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Graduated from Calloway County High School, in Murray, Kentucky.
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Graduated from Murray State University with a degree in Theater.
$9 Million
