‘The Insider’ Star (and ‘That Guy’ Hall of Famer) Bruce McGill Talks ‘Wipe That Smirk off Your Face’ and Making the Most of His Michael Mann Mom...

When Bruce McGill enters a scene, something exciting tends to happen. The 74-year-old character actor has spent five decades in Hollywood forging a mile-long resume of unmistakable, compact performances across every format and genre. Trained in the theater, he’s what you’d call a director’s dream—a versatile, old-school support player, the reliable standout in a star-studded ensemble, the pinch-hitter always ready for the spotlight. You might not know his name, but you know he’s going to deliver.

“I'm that guy,” McGill tells GQ on a recent hour-long phone call. “I'm a total that guy."

There may be no better evidence of this than in The Insider, Michael Mann’s masterful corporate thriller that hit theaters 25 years ago this week. Based on real events in the mid-1990s, it follows 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) attempting to get ex-tobacco scientist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) to break his non-disclosure agreement and reveal his former employer’s trade secrets over the air. A feverish depiction of capitalism and journalism fueled by an imposing roster of A-listers, the movie leans into the thorough, procedural nature of its vivid, complex, and paranoid story.

And yet, when McGill shows up at about the halfway mark, The Insider takes on another, louder dimension. He plays real-life attorney Ron Motley, tasked with deposing Wigand in a Mississippi courtroom so that the scientist can bypass his confidentiality pact. At the start of Motley’s questioning, however, a tobacco lawyer objects, interrupts, and commands Wigand to remain silent. Motley becomes incensed. “You don’t get to instruct anything around here,” he barks. “This is not North Carolina, not South Carolina, nor Kentucky. This is the sovereign state of Mississippi’s proceeding.” As the same lawyer snickers at the lecture, Motley immediately erupts.

“Wipe that smirk off your face!”

Everyone goes cold and quiet. It’s a killer line, the first moment of pure, unbridled catharsis, the first time someone has bulldogged, let alone advocated, for Wigand. With control of the room again, Motley stares daggers at his opponent, slowly takes a few beats, and turns toward his witness with a much gentler request. “Answer the question, Doctor.”

The scene has followed McGill professionally ever since. It played during The Insider’s Oscar reel, frequently trends on social media, and inspires raucous applause whenever it plays in a theater. It’s a prime example of an actor parachuting onto a film set, capturing the essence of the project, and leaving an unforgettable impression. McGill lets it rip and walks off with the movie. “This is a small part,” he says, “but it was the most impactful two-and-a-half minutes in my career.”

Here’s how it happened.

McGill remembers thinking his audition checked off all the boxes. “It was articulate, it was intelligent, it was lawyerly and understandable, and behaviorally real,” he says. But Mann knew the scene demanded something more, that it should be an inflection point in the movie. So he gave the actor a scenario to embody.

“This tobacco lawyer—I want him to fear for his safety,” McGill remembers Mann telling him. “Let’s say Ron Motley was just a few years away from playing football at Ole Miss. This lawyer should actually consider the thought that he might rip his arms out and beat him with it…You've got to take it up there, because structurally speaking, this is the first time in the film that anybody with any power has come to Wigand’s side.”

As McGill interpreted the new direction, Mann took out his camera and began filming the audition. “I went from 30 miles an hour in the school zone to 90 on the freeway in terms of intensity of delivery,” McGill says. The actor knew he’d earned the part when, in the middle of screaming, he heard Mann doing his best Sickos meme under his breath: “Great! Great! This is GREAT!”

Two months after the audition, McGill arrived on set (the production shot in the same Mississippi courtroom where the actual deposition took place) and made sure Mann still wanted him to go big. But as they began rehearsing, the director felt something was still missing from the script. “I don't know,” he said. “We need something you might tell a nine-year-old kid who's acting up, to wipe that smirk off their face…”

McGill perked up. “I said, ‘What's wrong with me saying, Wipe that smirk off your face?’ That’s a pretty good old Southern statement.” Mann liked his logic. “That was, as I put it, the biggest, shiniest bead on the necklace of that character's arc,” McGill says. “Michael just said, ‘Wow, that is great.’”

Aware that the line was going to reach for the highest decibels, McGill approached the movie’s sound recorder and gave him his vocal “score” so that his audio (which begins faintly, as he addresses Wigand up close) would never get blown out and distorted. “If they don't know you're going from very quiet to very loud, they'll turn the volume down and cut off the top of your shiny, bright beat,” McGill says. “And they can never get that back in production.”

“That’s right,” McGill laughs. “Tons.”

It’s no secret that Mann can be a particular director, but the actor didn’t anticipate running his boisterous, righteous monologue six-dozen times. Mann refused to use any master shots, relying each time on his Steadicam operator to capture McGill’s reactions in close-ups and from askew angles. “I used to do a lot of Shakespeare. My voice was pretty strong,” McGill says. “You're concerned that you vocally hold up when you have that kind of vocal gymnastics.” Though some blame rested with the actor who plays the tobacco lawyer, Mann insisted on “shooting the whole thing every time,” McGill says. “He sees the movie in his head, especially if he's written it…and he knows exactly what he wants.”

Over the first 10 to 15 takes, McGill knew he’d nailed it, but understood he had to keep every delivery consistent over the 15-hour shoot day. “When the audience watches the scene, you want that to look like that's the only thing you could have said at that point,” he says.

The amount of takes had a deleterious health effect on McGill. About a month before shooting, he’d had surgery on the “little area between your nuts and your butt,” he explains, after an abscess formed there, likely from an intestinal disorder he’d gotten while shooting a movie in Italy. Though doctors didn’t give him stitches (“it's not in a place that gets a lot of movement,” he says), the healing process had been proceeding fine. Until the deposition scene.

“When you yell out loud and you're stage trained, it really engages your diaphragm and your abdominals and your external obliques and all the muscles that lived around my surgery,” McGill says. “So I busted them in and I didn't know it. I knew I felt something go. I didn't want to say anything because I wanted to finish.”

A week later, McGill was on the phone with his doctor when the incision burst the recently-healed skin and covered his inner thighs in blood, requiring another hospital visit. “Michael actually got a kick out of it,” McGill says. “I said to him, "I busted a gut for you."

Though McGill never spoke directly with Motley, he leaned on transcripts, first-hand accounts, and Motley’s own law partner Dick Scruggs to get a better sense of the pair’s anti-tobacco efforts. “Ron was a man of great appetite and excess, but he was, as Dick put it, a genius about deposing people,” McGill says.

McGill’s performance was apparently so spot on that Scruggs later asked if the actor would consider becoming a trial lawyer and deposing witnesses for real. It only affirmed the accuracy of his performance. “You just need to be able to get people to say things on the record, but it was very interesting to realize that being a good actor with good preparation showed him a persona that he knew,” McGill says. “He was looking at an impersonation with some of the same lines of dialogue as his partner.”

Inside the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, McGill remembers the debut crowd giving an ovation as the deposition scene concluded. “It was an electric moment in that audience,” he says. “It was filled with industry A-listers who didn’t know what to expect, which is of course what you want. You want them to see it fresh.”

Later, during the afterparty, Crowe spotted him and couldn’t believe how well the scene had played in a full house. “Fucking McGill!” he yelled jokingly. “I gained weight, shaved my head. He does two minutes, he gets applause.” Pacino gave him a more demonstrative celebration when he saw him from across the room: “BRUUUUUCCEEEE!!!!”

McGill has amassed an enormous amount of credits since wiping the floor with Big Tobacco, but his collaborators keep celebrating his deposition scene as though it happened yesterday. That includes showrunner Taylor Sheridan, who recently employed McGill for the second season of Lioness. "You know that scene you did for Michael Mann?" Sheridan asked him on his first day of shooting. "I really love that 'Wipe that smirk off your face.'"

He wasn’t just being friendly. When McGill finished the third episode of his contract and approached Sheridan to say goodbye, the director had other news. “Oh, you’re not done,” he said. “I'm gonna write you some ‘Wipe that smirk off your face’ shit.” True to his word, Sheridan wrote a big blow-up scene between McGill and Michael Kelly that ends with McGill yelling: “Show some fucking respect.” Before shooting, McGill “went back and listened [to The Insider scene], remembered how I did that, and applied the same basic music, if you will,” he says.

Then he realized something subtly profound. “It had exactly the same number of syllables as "Wipe that smirk off your face,’” he laughs.