Joe Pantoliano is an unstoppable force. Whether he’s chewing the scenery as a movie villain in The Matrix, playing the straight man opposite comedy legends in the Bad Boys movies, or elevating an otherwise forgettable piece of dialogue, nobody does it better (or seemingly more often) than Joey Pants.
That reputation even earned him a special segment on The Ringer’s popular podcast The Rewatchables, where Bill Simmons and his co-hosts dole out a Joey Pants “That Guy” Award for the best recognizable character actor to appear in each film they revisit. For Pantoliano, who says his son told him about the award but didn’t explain what it meant, he sees it as validation of a long, successful career.
“I’m happy to still be working,” Pantoliano tells Inverse, “so I take that as a total compliment.”
It’s not just that he’s prolific. Pantoliano points out that a lot of his most iconic roles weren’t particularly well developed until he came along. Without mentioning any of them specifically, he calls out the quality of some of those parts over the years.
“I would say that 70% of the work that I’ve settled on was underwritten,” Pantoliano says. “And so I had to breath life into one-dimensional characters. It’s always so much easier when you’ve got characters that are on the page and just fantastically written — what any actor would hope for. Some of these anemic parts that I’ve played, I’ve been able to turn into memorable roles.”
We have to assume, however, that when it comes to Captain Conrad Howard, the character was there from the very start. Pantoliano has played the part of the cranky but reliable police captain across three decades and four Bad Boys movies. In the 1995 original, the studio brought him in to ground a buddy cop film starring two first-time Hollywood actors in Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. But by the time they got to 2024’s Bad Boys: Ride or Die, it was Smith who demanded that Pantoliano join the cast.
“Will really wanted this to happen,” Pantoliano says. “That was my ace in the hole that he wanted to see the captain come back, and then they came up with this idea.”
If you haven’t seen the third entry in the franchise, allow me to spoil its biggest twist. During the 2020 legacy sequel Bad Boys for Life, Captain Conrad Howard is shot and dies, delivering a brutal gut punch right at the climax of the film. With that in mind, you may be wondering how the character could return from the dead in Bad Boys 4. The answer is simple: He doesn’t.
Instead, the movie revolves around a plot to ruin the dead police captain’s reputation and incriminate the Bad Boys (Smith and Lawrence) in the process. To save the day, our heroes uncover a series of videotapes recorded by Howard before this death, which help them stay one step ahead of the villains. Pantoliano got a heads-up early on that he’d be returning to the role one more time in this unconventional way.
“I had gotten a call during the development that they were keeping me in the loop and I was happy,” he says. “It's the classic agent conversation when they call you and say, ‘Listen, it’s not a big part, but they talk about you throughout the movie.’ So it was great and they took care of me.”
Howard also appears in a very different way during another scene early in the movie. After Lawrence’s character has a heart attack while dancing too hard during a wedding, Pantoliano greets him in the afterlife (portrayed as a surreal beach) where he hugs his old friend and whispers, “It’s not your time.”
For Pantoliano, the highlight of that experience was seeing how the VFX team brought this vision of the the afterlife to, well, life.
“I was fascinated by it: the blue screen and the way that they do this stuff now,” he says. “It was sand on a soundstage with that perch and Martin and I, and so everything was added in. That moment was, I don’t know, maybe 10 frames, 15 frames, and then seeing it all put together — it’s getting harder and harder to find the smoke and mirrors.”
While that scene — and Pantoliano’s entire part in Bad Boys: Ride or Die — might be smaller than what we’re seen from Captain Conrad Howard in the past, the actor has a way of seeing the silver lining in everything:
“It’s always better to have a small part in a hit than a big part in a piece of sh*t.”
