Why Special Agent Bill Newsome From NCIS: LA’s Season 14 Finale Looks So Familiar
The endgame of “NCIS: Los Angeles” Season 14 introduces us to ATF Special Agent William Newsome. He would seem like an affable enough guy if it wasn’t for the fact that someone on the inside has been stealing dangerous military materials, and Bill might just fit the bill. It doesn’t exactly help that Newsome goes missing in the middle of the investigation, either.
Newsome is an intriguing character because while he’s ostensibly on the side of the angels, he’s something of a rogue, and has been undercover for quite a while. As such, there’s no telling what’s going on until the plot proceeds to a point where the agent’s true loyalties are revealed. In other words, it’s the kind of guest star role that requires a believable presence and a hint of veiled danger that makes the character potentially suitable for both good guy and villain parts. Fortunately, the show got precisely the man for the role: legendary MMA fighter Randy Couture, who has played both heroes and villains over the course of his acting career. The famous athlete has been acting for quite a while now, and you may very well have seen some of his previous work.
Randy Couture was the evil ruler in The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
The original “Scorpion King” famously reworked Dwayne Johnson’s “The Mummy Return” villain into an epic action hero. While the star doesn’t return for seconds in the critically-panned “The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior,” his character Mathayus (now played by Michael Copon) at least has a truly terrifying opponent in Randy Couture’s General Sargon.
Sargon is the killer of Matthayus’ father who now rules over Akkad, and both the young hero and the warrior king level up multiple times over the course of the movie. Randy Couture with magical powers is obviously a tough nut to crack, and the athlete-turned-actor had little problem projecting the threat Sargon poses. However, while the action was no obstacle, there were two moments in the movie that Couture found particularly demanding.
“One was the love scene,” the star told Hola America. “It was my first kind of interaction like that in a movie, and the second was at the end of the movie where I basically die and you see people die on film all the time and you kind of want to pull it off, you don’t want it to be corny and kind of over the top.”
He’s the dependable demolition expert of the Expendables franchise
2010’s “The Expendables” is an all-star collection of 1980s action heroes doing what they do best as a team. Though he’s less of an established action movie name than many of his franchise co-stars, Randy Couture’s real-life MMA accolades more than make up for his lack of big-screen action accolades. As such, his Toll Road is a dependable Expendable in all three movies in the series, and is set to return for yet another mission in “Expendables 4.”
Though Couture certainly has nothing to be ashamed of on the physicality front, he knows full well the kind of company he gets to keep in “The Expendables” and its sequels. In the first movie, he was particularly impressed by Sylvester Stallone’s incredible work ethic, though he did note that everyone worked quite hard.
“Well, I still don’t know how Sly survived that first movie, to be frank,” he described the filming in an interview with That Shelf. “I mean, he wore so many hats to get through that entire process and we shot nights throughout the entire film just to get to the end. We did that for 12 weeks and we were up every, single night. Sundays were the only nights we had off, and you kind of get off track being up all night, all week.”
He played a recurring antagonist in Hawaii Five-0
“NCIS: Los Angeles” is far from the only show in Randy Couture’s CBS procedural resume. In fact, you might very well recognize him as Jason Duclair, the fire-obsessed recurring antagonist in “Hawaii Five-0.” A prolific and elaborate arsonist, Duclair first appears in Season 5 of the show and proceeds to make a handful of appearances until his final, predictably fiery episode in Season 8. In an interview with USA Today Sports, Couture shared his views about playing the “Hawaii Five-0” villain and revealed that the makers of the show were somewhat tentative about his reaction toward the nature of his role when they reached out to him.
“I think they kind of wanted me to play a bad buy but they weren’t sure how I’d respond to that,” he said. However, Couture was extremely happy about hopping in Duclair’s shoes. “That’s why we do this,” he explained. “You get to do all kinds of stuff you would never do in real life.”
