Robin Williams Gave His Finest Performance In ‘The Fisher King’

The day Robin Williams died, five years ago this month, was one of the only times I can remember openly weeping at the loss of a celebrity who I’d never met but always adored. Robin Williams, the man, was not my friend or even my colleague, but Robin Williams, the performer, had been with me for my entire life, permeating every era of my own existence with some pop culture memory of his unforgettable presence. As a child it was Aladdin Robin, whose monologues I would memorize and deliver at school. As a teenager, Good Will Hunting Robin swept me up in his humanity and A Night at the Met Robin made me laugh so hard I almost crashed my car while listening to the CD. As an adult I filled in the gaps with everything from Insomnia to The Birdcage, perpetually astonished by his range and the inspired details that were always present in his acting. Robin Williams died having infused every space of my life with his admirably vulnerable, humble sense of joy. 

That night, with dozens of performances to choose from in an effort to pay tribute to him in the hours after his death, I chose The Fisher King.

Five years later, and more than a decade after I first saw it, the film remains my favorite Robin Williams performance. On the anniversary of his death, it’s worth talking about why. 

Williams stars in the film, written by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam, as Perry, a Medieval history professor whose wife and sanity were taken from him one night when a man walked into a bar with shotgun and started killing people at random (the film came out in 1991, but it’s perpetually topical). When we meet him, Perry is living in a basement, and believes himself to be a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail, which he claims is hidden in a castle-like mansion in Manhattan. He believes he can complete this quest with the help of Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges), a disgraced former radio DJ who lost his job when he inadvertently encouraged the man who shot up the bar and killed Perry’s wife to go through with the act. After Perry saves Jack from an attack one night, Jack feels he might owe him a little money, but when he realizes who Perry is and that his careless words on the radio contributed to his condition, he feels he might owe him a lot more. 

It’s here that the meat of the film begins, a story of intertwined destinies with Bridges as the feet driving the story forward and Williams as the heart that makes us keep watching. Both performances are astonishing, and both actors are pushed even further by Gilliam’s kinetic, fantasy-tinged direction, but its Williams who clearly steals the movie from both Bridges and their terrific co-stars Mercedes Ruehl and Amanda Plummer, because he is better than perhaps any other actor of his generation at giving us damaged but joyous people whose vulnerability can’t hide their brilliance. 

Midway through the film, Perry explains to Jack the story that gives the film its title, a story of a king and a fool with the Holy Grail between them. In the story, the fool turns out to be unexpectedly wise, and in the film Gilliam presents a narrative in which both Jack and Perry have a chance to play the fool, sometimes swapping the role in the course of a single scene. It’s here that Williams truly shines, giving us a character who speaks in epic romantic poems one second and dips into shrieking madness the next, a character who is undoubtedly capable of taking care of himself right up until the moment he isn’t. It’s a dazzling, turn-on-a-dime performance full of big acting showcases, but Williams didn’t stop there. 

Too often we confuse “best acting” with “most acting,” awarding the actors who are willing to transform physically or adopt broad, flashy character traits to get the performance across. There’s a place for that, great work is done there, and certainly Williams’ work in The Fisher King often fits in that category. He does everything in this film from sing and dance to scream in the street to drag his butt across the Central Park grass in a full frontal nude scene. There is a lot of acting going on within Perry, and certainly a lot of stuff in Williams’ performance is far flashier than anything Bridges is doing, but the real heart of Williams as Perry isn’t that. It’s in one of his last moment’s in the film, when he wakes up from a catatonic state after having a breakdown and talks about his late wife. In a quiet, restrained voice, he simply say “I really miss her, Jack. Is that OK? Can I miss her now?”

Perry is a man who externalized the worlds that lived within his brain – in his case, medieval history and folklore – to bury the trauma of his life. He was no longer a lonely widower, but a knight in search of triumph. The world wasn’t a cruel place where mass shootings and lax care for the mentally ill could happen, but a world where the brave and the just could prevail if they kept their hearts true. His enemy was not himself, but a fire-breathing knight in the darkness he could trick and outrun. 

In those final moments, Williams conveys all of this to us by bringing Perry out the other side of his trauma. His not cured, but he can grieve. He is not done suffering, but he doesn’t have to do it alone. It’s a beautiful, complex, often staggering portrait of a man who breaks and then grows stronger at the broken places, and through Perry’s dingy smile Williams was telling us that he understood that, and that we could be that way, too.

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Where to stream The Fisher King