In high school, Chris Ellis would elicit comparisons to Herman Munster.
The light behind him accentuates the shade on his eyes from an overhanging brow that made adolescents think of Dr. Frankenstein’s made-for-TV creation. It’s the part of his body Ellis would emphasize if he were to draw a caricature of himself.
The retired character actor sits down in a yellow armchair in his Harpswell home. On one side is a twine basket stacked high with sketch pads; on the other, a wooden bowl he crafted himself, filled with markers and Sharpies.
Ellis, 79, has lived a storied life, from a childhood in the lowly Memphis neighborhood of Frayser and the “bone-grinding poverty” he experienced early in his career, while living in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, to the sets of blockbusters such as “Apollo 13,” “Catch Me if You Can,” and “Armageddon.”
While Ellis is thankful for his more than 30 years of acting, he calls it a “side hustle” for his true love of caricatures — an art form he has practiced and mastered since the age of 25.
When moving to Maine from Los Angeles for retirement, Ellis was apprehensive about the change in climate, but found comfort in knowing he would have time to pursue his passions.
“My first thought is that now all I’ll have to do all day long while shivering in the cold is to turn wooden bowls and draw silly caricatures,” he said. “And that’s what I have done.”
While Ellis’ porcelain white beard helps him blend in on the Maine coast, it has only existed since he arrived 14 months ago. He grew it for a role as a lobsterman in “The Ghost Trap” film, shot in Maine, where he met friend and fellow actor Paul Bellefeuille.
The two often meet for coffee to exchange anecdotes from their careers or simply talk about life.
“When we’re having coffee, people will come in and he’ll just go over and chat with everybody,” Bellefeuille said. “All of a sudden we’ve become brothers.”
Ellis’ career seemingly jump-started after 1990’s “Days of Thunder,” when he was in his 40s. However, his life as an actor can be traced back to when he was 5 and watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” on his family’s television in Frayser.
As a child, Ellis did not understand the “cultural economic deprivation” he was experiencing in Frayser, on Memphis’ north side.
“It was not always understood that denizens of Frayser would get farther afield than the local penal colony or an Army recruiting office,” Ellis said.
Ellis did know two things: He hated country music and he yearned for the life of privilege and entitlement the actors on “The Mickey Mouse Club” enjoyed.
This marked the first step in his acting career. His official start came at a local community theater where he would perform Shakespeare.
In a production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Ellis had a line containing Shakespeare’s longest word — honorificabilitudinitatibus — which he can still pronounce to perfection.
Also when Ellis was 5, he discovered his drawing abilities. He became serious about drawing in April 1972, when he came across the work of caricature artist David Levine, whose drawings were published in the New York Review of Books.
“I looked at it as if I just stuck a bobby pin in a wall socket,” Ellis said. “I’m unworthy to gather up the crumbs under his table, but he was my greatest influence, my greatest teacher.”
After a friend offered Ellis a place to stay in New York in 1977, he left Tennessee behind with $100 and a “spirit of abandon.”
He quickly fell into luck, competing on the game show “Shoot for the Stars” and winning money and a car. However, after a year, he endured “professional desolation.”
He attempted to make a living with his drawings, but found the lack of work and low hourly wage unsustainable, so he had to “fall back” on acting. His break came after his agent told him to lean into his Southern roots and become a “good ole boy from Tennessee.”
This new strategy gave birth to his acting persona of “Sheriff Cracker Von Peckerwood,” a southern authority figure characterized by cold stares and a stern demeanor.
The persona is in stark contrast to the lighthearted and easygoing Ellis, who can be spotted around Harpswell dressed in Hawaiian shirts, taking care of his two dogs.
“The character that I got stuck playing is somebody that I did not especially identify with, but whom I grew up hating and fearing,” Ellis said. “The small world that I grew up in was filled with the characters that I ended up portraying.”
Ellis said he never ventured far from these roles, understanding his “place in the food chain.” Typical roles included the general, the police officer, the school principal, or the astronaut.
After “Days of Thunder,” Ellis went on to appear in “Apollo 13,” “Armageddon,” and “October Sky” throughout the ’90s.
“There was a codicil in the Screen Actors Guild contract to the effect that any movie that had a countdown in it had to have me in it,” Ellis joked.
Chris Ellis never became a household name like some of the actors he worked with, including Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I’m somebody who was fit to swell a scene or two, but I was never in the spotlight,” he said. “I was the guy behind the guy in the spotlight. I was the guy whose elbow you see.”
At the peak of his career, Ellis would sometimes get stopped at airports and corner stores. More frequently, someone would stare at him, squinting as if rummaging through their brain to pinpoint why they recognized him.
“Didn’t we go to high school together?” Ellis remembered these people asking.
“No, I used to cut your yard,” he would reply.
In a conversation at the Itty Bitty Coffee Shop, Ellis asked if this story was about “another washed-up actor” on the shores of Harpswell. In talking with Ellis, it’s evident he is far from just another actor.
Ellis lacks the ego endemic to those filling the red carpets. He brings an authenticity that Hollywood can strip from even the most genuine of people, and modesty shown through constant attempts to downplay his illustrious career.
“That’s him,” Bellefeuille said. “The guy you interviewed is him. There’s nothing fake about him at all.”
Later in his career, Ellis grew tired of playing the same role. Because of his age, his agent started pitching him as the judge, the senator, the grandfather. One of his “cushiest” jobs was the role of a judge on a season of the TNT show “Murder in the First,” where he sat in a robe and intermittently yelled, “Objection sustained!”
After a long career in Hollywood, Ellis and his wife, Christal, decided to move to the place where Christal spent her childhood summers — Harpswell. In 2022, they packed their bags, sold their house, and hopped in a car en route to Maine, moving from a land where stars are found on every street corner to one where they flood the night sky.
Ellis does not watch his own movies — there are some he’s never seen. He and Christal will watch a British whodunit after dinner, but the rest of his free time is spent woodworking in his basement shop and making forsythias blossom in his yard.
Of course, he spends ample time working on his caricatures. Every day, Ellis posts a drawing of a late celebrity or historical figure, accompanied by a witty obituary, on his Facebook and Instagram.
Ellis’ drawings have been shown at his alma mater, the University of Memphis, in an art show, and he is considering creating a book or a calendar with them.
His process begins in his chair, where he will pick out a familiar name or someone whose obscurity strikes him. Then he will download photographic references and trace them on a light board, warping details until it suits him.
It is the same chair Ellis sits in now, across from his golden retriever, Mr. MacGregor, who would stir at the sound of a skin cell dropping, and beside his small dog named Miss Chapel.
While Ellis describes himself as retired, he said he will take an acting job if it comes to him. However, he said he is content with a career in which his face was more recognizable than his name, and he hopes to draw his last breaths in Harpswell.
“I want to run out the clock in company with the people that I’ve met up here,” Ellis said. “I’m happy just to be, ‘Oh, that guy.’ I’m happy to be the guy that might have gone to high school with you or cut your yard.”
