At a certain point in the seventies, Stacy Keach seemed on a career arc similar to contemporaries Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino. Onstage, he had won four Drama Desk Awards and been nominated for a Tony, while onscreen, he was working with directors like Robert Altman (Brewster McCloud) and John Huston (Fat City). But Keach tried so strenuously to avoid being pigeonholed (hence his turn as a stoner cop in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke) and remained so committed to theater that his moment passed him by; he found a different sort of stardom in the eighties on TV’s The New Mike Hammer, then nearly undermined that when he got arrested in London for cocaine possession. Since those days he has ping-ponged from projects great and small (American History X, Titus, narrating World’s Most Amazing Videos), but has always kept busy: Currently he’s receiving raves playing the brush-it-under-the-rug patriarch Lyman Wyeth in Other Desert Cities on Broadway. And when The Bourne Legacy is released later this year, it will mark the first time Stacy Keach has appeared in a Hollywood blockbuster since — well, since forever. We asked the affable Keach if he would take us through his résumé a bit, and his anecdotes of film’s most venerated and bizarre figures did not disappoint.

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