Welcome to “They’re in That??,” a recurring column about actors we had totally forgotten were in certain things
I’ve been (re)watching a lot of James Bond movies recently, and ruminating on my favorite characters in the franchise. One character I love is the giant, metal-toothed henchman/assassin Jaws, who appears in both The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). He’s played by the actor/creature performer Richard Kiel. But as I was scrolling through IMDb, I discovered something I should have realized on my own: in addition to countless other iconic roles, Kiel played the alien in the classic “To Serve Man” episode of The Twilight Zone!
I’m freakin’ out!
Kiel as Jaws in Moonraker
I love moments like this: when you realize that the performer of a character you love is also responsible for another character you love. It’s like when I was a really little kid and I realized that Burgess Meredith was not only the Penguin in Batman and the lead in my personal favorite Twilight Zone episode (“Time Enough at Last”), but also Mickey Goldmill in Rocky. The acting profession, folks… it’s wild. You play many different parts! It boggles the mind!
But yes, Jaws the henchman and the main Kanamit alien are the same actor! (He actually played all the Kanamit aliens in that episode.)
Richard Kiel, who stood at 7’2″ (2.71 m), was a legendary supporting actor of TV and film. He was born in Detroit in 1939, and worked in numerous professions before becoming an actor. Among many other roles, in 1965, he portrayed Voltaire, the assistant to Michael Dunn’s megalomaniacal arch-villain Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless in the most insane network show of the 60s, The Wild Wild West. He was considered for the role of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk television show, and he was also the original choice to play Chewbacca in Star Wars.
In 1976, he appeared in the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedy Silver Streak which is a murder-mystery thriller-comedy set on a train. He plays Reace, the henchman of antagonist Patrick McGoohan, and… guess what? Reace has a set of metal teeth… golden, not silvery like Jaws does. Well, well, well.
Evidently, the producers of the upcoming Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me thought he’d be perfect for the henchman role, which they then tweaked to include a set of large metal teeth. Probably because it’s a super cool idea, and he wears them really well.
