Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

The Will Leitch Newsletter is one of the few Substacks I subscribe to, not least because his divergent interests tend to dovetail with mine, and I have appreciated how so far in 2026, he has not shied away from almost always prefacing whatever he wants to write about with addressing the present American outrages. These are extraordinary times in the worst way and acknowledging it does not feel redundant or sanctimonious but like a necessary refusal to normalize. This country has normalized way too damn much in the last decade and such normalization, I would argue, is a huge part of why we are where we are right now. Even so, such brutal preambles can wear a person out, and a few weeks ago, Leitch introduced his latest lament of the nation by writing, “Believe you me: I’d rather be…ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.” The ensuing week he noted that a reader from Saint Paul, Minnesota, epicenter of the current American crisis, wrote to say that he could really use Leitch ranking Kelly Reichardt movies right now. And so, as Leitch wrote, he scrapped his previously planned post about the American media’s coverage of the current President’s quote-unquote movement during the last ten years to instead rank Richard Linklater movies to clear his head.

To my clear head, well, I’m not going to rank Richard Linklater movies or Kelly Reichardt movies. I love them both, but this blog’s brand is a bit more irregular. And because I’ve had the movie year 1995 on my mind recently because of a post I am planning to have coincide with the upcoming Academy Awards, I’m going to rank supporting actors in that year’s action-thriller “Crimson Tide” in which a submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his XO (Denzel Washington) battle over whether to launch nuclear missiles with war imminent or to find a way to retrieve a half-finished message that might confirm war has been aborted. And though it is made in the image of its legendary two leads, “Crimson Tide” is in the (more than) middling thriller hall of fame because it is chock full of dudes (and one dog).

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

10. Viggo Mortensen. If it seems odd that an actor as accomplished as Mortensen might be so low on this list, well, thing is, the supporting roles as conceived and written in “Crimson Tide” require the actors to infuse a sense of personality more than create a character and Mortensen is more a create-a-character kinda guy. So, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine, and his laconic voice sounds fantastic aboard a submarine, and he really smokes those cigarettes, it’s just, in this context, I’m looking for something else. 

9. Eric Bruskotter. The role is a little obvious, a lunkhead on the wrong side of things, but boy, does Bruskotter bring that lunkhead to life.

8. Tommy Bush. At the end, there is a small but critical part requiring an actor with enough stature to make you believe he possesses more authority than Gene freaking Hackman which is why “Crimson Tide” fills it with Jason Robards. (It is also why Robards is ineligible for this list.) But there is another small, if less critical, role near the beginning that also requires someone to appear as if he has more stature than Gene freaking Hackman. So, what are you going to do? You don’t have enough in the budget for another Jason Robards. Credit, then, to casting director Victoria Thomas for choosing a seasoned character actor like Bush, and credit to costume designer George L. Little for putting him in some J.T. Walsh glasses, and for Bush just sort of allowing this broader framework to impress the necessary longstanding authority with doing much of anything at all. 

7. Happy Lab. The Jack Russell terrier that is the loyal companion of Hackman’s character gets all the pub, but it’s this dog, as Washington’s canine counterpart, that gets my vote as Best in Show. 

6. Danny Nucci. He was something of a going concern in the 90s, as his Wikipedia entry attests, the first sentence under the career tab noting, “During the 1990s, Nucci played characters who are unceremoniously killed off in three blockbuster films – ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ and ‘Titanic.’” Ah, but in “Crimson Tide,” he sticks around to the end, and more than that, does a solid job in evincing the small arc of a petty officer who comes into his own.

5. Matt Craven. For a long time there, in the 90s and even into the aughts, any movie that needed an asshole, whatever the variety, Craven was near the front of the rolodex. I was recently rewatching parts of “A Few Good Men” for obvious reasons and there was Craven, called in for one scene to be the livid military lawyer who’s had it up to here with Tom Cruise and he nails it. And he nails the asshole in “Crimson Tide” too. At the end, right when nuclear war is averted, Craven has his character get this get look (see above) that is a little disappointed, like he would have gone to war to be right. That’s the stuff.

4. George Dzundza. More than the other supporting characters, Dzundza’s is written with a sense of ethical and moral complication, and he carries it with great anguish. 

3. Marcello Thedford. Yes, reader, you might notice Steve Zahn in the background of this shot, and he is not the only known quantity in a smaller role. There is also Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Rick Schroder. None of them, though, leave as big an impression as Thedford. Not just in this pictured moment where he does a little dance-karaoke to Martha and the Vandellas, but in an earlier scene where he expresses true geniality toward the Gandolfini and Mortensen characters right before they have fun with him by dressing him down. There are precious few moments of levity in “Crimson Tide” and quite possibly the two best involve Thedford.  

2. James Gandolfini. As with virtually all his pre-“Sopranos” work, you could see Gandolfini already had “it” in “Crimson Tide,” clear as day, by which I mean both an electricity and an intensity. Whether it’s believable behavior for a naval supply officer or not, I don’t really care, but when the stuff hits the fan, I love how he plays the part as something like a sneering prizefighter trying to goad you into throwing a punch after the bell. His single best moment, though, comes before the stuff hits the fan during an officer meal when Hackman’s character superciliously asks Washington’s to summarize his thoughts on the nature of war and Gandolfini smirks (see above) in this way that implies “Ok, hotshot, show me whatcha got” with more animosity than most characters get when they are throwing a punch. 

1. Richard Valeriani. There are a thousand things I love about this movie, but one of the things I love most is that it frames its big introductory chunk of exposition as a faux CNN report filed from the deck of an aircraft carrier by the real-life reporter Richard Valeriani. That’s inspired. Valeriani was on Nixon’s enemies list, his wife Kathie Berlin told The New York Times when her husband died in 2018, and he kicked off one of the greatest (more than) middling thrillers ever made. What a career.

Wistfully '95: Crimson Tide

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.

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It’s movie obsessive common knowledge that Tony Scott’s “True Romance” co-conspirator Quentin Tarantino did uncredited rewrites to Scott’s 1995 submarine epic “Crimson Tide”, named for a football team that then was not quite as overbearing as it is now. Mr. Tarantino’s re-writes pertained not to sonar and periscopes, because that's not Q.T.'s wheelhouse, but rather to additions of pop culture, marking it a tad more accessible and a bit more humorous. One of those additions appears near the start when a couple submarine officers earnestly discuss commanders in submarine movies. They mention “The Enemy Below”, which pit Robert Mitchum as an American sub captain locked in deep sea battle with Curd Jurgens as a German sub captain. They mention “Run Silent Run Deep” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy are both Americans aboard the same sub who must find a way to work together. And while both these movies inform “Crimson Tide”, rest assured, Tony Scott, the maverick who gave birth to Maverick, goes his own way.

“A maximalist,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her New York Times obituary of Tony Scott, “(he) used a lot of everything in his movies: smoke, cuts, camera moves, color.” Truth. Mr. Scott never met a formal trick he wouldn’t subsequently pile like so much coleslaw on top of a cinematic sandwich that already had two pounds of meat and fries. “Busy” never really captured his aesthetic; his camera was a day trader high on whatever you’d like and everything else. Still, what often got lost amidst his impressive deployments of frenzied style were the epic confrontations between characters. Tony Scott loved confrontations. We remember “Top Gun” for its flash and dash and Ray Bans, of course, but we remember it just as fondly for Maverick vs. Ice and Maverick vs. Jester and Maverick vs. Viper and Maverick vs. Himself. We remember Christopher Walken squaring off with Dennis Hopper in an incredible verbal tete a tete. Then there’s “Crimson Tide.”

In theory, “Crimson Tide” is a showdown between the United States and a Russian ultra-nationalist, between opposing submarines lurking in the depths of the sea. Of course, it’s not really about any of those Cliff Notes. What it’s really about is the two primary officers aboard the U.S. Naval nuclear sub, the USS Alabama (“Go ‘bama! Roll tide!”), Captain Frank Ramsey and his brand new handpicked Executive Officer Ron Hunter. It’s about slowly escalating confrontation between these two men born of an order rendered incomplete on account of a technical glitch that causes mutinies and reams and reams of splendid shouting matches. More than that, though, it’s about a confrontation between two actors, Gene Hackman raising hell as Ramsey and Denzel Washington maintaining impassioned fastidiousness as Hunter.

To be sure, Scott gussies up his films with plenty of bells and whistles, not to mention lathering it up with a prototypical booming Hans Zimmer score. There are depth charges and catastrophic leaks and missiles fired and all sorts of other traditional action-packed entrees served. Yet it never comes across as more than Simpson/Bruckheimer contracted scaffolding to provide a place where two all-world thespians can unleash verbal torrents, both loudly or quietly. It’s a friendly, hella good reminder that so often the only energy source a film requires to power it to ascendant heights is a couple acting titans. And this is why the film ends not with more missiles fired and not with WWIII, but with Hackman and Washington seated across from one another discussing Lipizzan Stallions.

It also ends with Ramsey recommending to a Naval Tribunal that Hunter be given command of his own boat, and it’s not difficult to read this conclusion as Hackman passing the baton of his own role on to his co-star. “When threatened, Hackman retreats to his glasses and clipboard,” Steven Hyden wrote in his January retrospective of the actor, “the accoutrements of command. And how does Denzel respond? I DO NOT RECOGNIZE YOUR AUTHORITY. Like that, Denzel Washington becomes Gene Hackman right before your eyes. And Denzel held on to that role in subsequent movies. Flash forward 20 years and it’s Denzel playing daddy to Mark Wahlberg in 2 Guns.”

Eh, yes and no. I'd agree with the first part, not the second. Yes, Washington has often assumed the Ramsey-ish role of charismatic elder, dealing with or imparting wisdom to or screaming at a co-star, but Wahlberg vs. Washington is assuredly not Washington vs. Hackman. Nor was Ethan Hawke in “Training Day”, a part working away from Washington’s King Kong postulating and a performance that didn't win even if its character did. Angelia Jolie took a turn as Washington's protégé in “The Bone Collector” and though she won an Academy Award a year later this was still before Angie had cracked the Jolie Movie Star Code. Ryan Reynolds in “Safe House” is like watching a Biloxi Shucker flail away against a Major League pitcher.

“For more than 30 years,” Hyden wrote, “people bought movie tickets to watch Hackman take charge.” In “Crimson Tide”, Hackman took charge and Washington had the cojones to wrestle that charge away. And now, twenty years later, Washington continues roaming Hollywood evermore intent to take overblown thrillers like “The Equalizer” in an increasingly woebegone effort to find someone willing and able to wrest charge away from him. I fear in twenty years, he'll still be searching.