The Best And Worst Onscreen Richard Nixon Impersonations

X-Men: Days of Future Past is a time-travelling romp that juxtaposes a future dystopia with ’70s kitsch. Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and his bestie Magneto (Ian McKellen), besieged by killer Sentinel robots, use the powers of Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to 1973. There, jaded young Professor X (James McAvoy) and still-power-hungry Magneto (Michael Fassbender) must join forces to prevent Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating the inventor of the Sentinels, Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage).

See, if Mystique kills Trask, US President Richard Nixon will see mutants as a threat and pursue the Sentinel program. A heavily made-up Mark Camacho plays the 37th US President as a crappy caricature. When he said, “My fellow Americans…” I scoffed aloud in the cinema.

Nixon resigned in disgrace 40 years ago, and to anyone who grew up after Watergate, he’s a Cold War punchline. We laugh at his sweary rages, his paranoia, his recalcitrant refusal to admit wrongdoing and his determination to screw his political enemies.

Most Nixon impersonations adopt a hunched, defensive posture, with hair slicked back from a widow’s peak. Prosthetic makeup is optional, but can be used to add a stern, beetling brow, pouchy cheeks and a scooped nose with a slightly bulbous end. Then there’s the voice: a measured, ironic baritone with eccentric phrasing and pauses.

But the Nixon familiar to most people — jowly, frowning, with a slurred voice like a mouthful of plums — is not the young senator who gave the famous ‘Checkers’ speech in 1952, the vice-president outshone by JFK in the 1960 campaign debates, or even the comeback kid depicted on the cover of Esquire in 1968. It’s the angry, besieged Nixon of 1973-4, the retired Nixon who was famously interviewed by David Frost in 1977, and the one who later appeared on CNN’s Crossfire in 1982.

So, how does X-Men’s terrible Nixon compare to the other Tricky Dicks of film and TV? I’ve ranked them from best to worst.

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James McManus In Black Dynamite (2009)

“Showtime, motherfucker!” James McManus does not physically resemble Nixon at all…but that’s part of the shonky fun of his nunchuck-slinging tour-de-force performance in this blaxploitation pastiche. It’s as broad as the ’70s ties and lapels, full of weird, angry growls.

What makes this White House duel so great is that Nixon’s trademark underhanded fury actually erupts into fighting dirty. As Mark Feeney notes in his book, Nixon at the Movies, Nixon was a film buff who adored westerns. It’s genius, really, to depict him as the action hero he yearned to be, and then to still leave him defeated and humiliated in the end.

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Philip Baker Hall In Secret Honor (1984)

Hall originally developed Secret Honor as a one-man stage play, and he reprises the role in Robert Altman’s surprisingly cinematic monologue. Hall looks strikingly like Nixon, but more importantly, he’s absolutely committed to his extraordinary act of psychological ventriloquism.

Secret Honor is set in Nixon’s retirement as he paces his New Jersey home study, getting progressively drunker on whisky and dictating rambling reminiscences about his life and career into a tape recorder. See-sawing between self-pitying melancholy, delusion and wrath at the perceived failures of others (never himself), it’s unnervingly visceral and satisfyingly hammy in the way of panto villains. “Fuck ’em all!”

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Billy West In Futurama (1999-2013)

The genius of Richard Nixon’s Head is cumulative. Even in his halcyon days, Nixon always seemed a little awkward and out of step with his times. So projecting him a thousand years into the future through the miracle of head-pickling offers endless amusement: Nixon is still trying to defend his place in history, and still ambitious for the top job.

West does a pretty lightly caricatured vocal impression of Nixon — it’s actually not as hammy as some other actors. But his delivery of the lines that slyly riff on Nixon’s public speeches is just superb, especially in the 1999 episode ‘A Head in the Polls’, when he reminisces about his body. And I can’t stop LOLing at Nixon abruptly shouting at Checkers to “SHUT UP, DAMMIT!”

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Dan Hedaya In Dick (1999)

You might recognise Dan Hedaya as Cher Horowitz’s grouchy lawyer dad in Clueless. He brings the same indignant, fulminating quality to this political farce – which is packed with Saturday Night Live alumni — as a president inadvertently toppled by two teenage girls (Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst). (Trivia: in the 1995 biopic Nixon, Hedaya played a character based on Nixon’s BFF, Charles ‘Bebe’ Rebozo.)

Hedaya’s awesome because he treats the Nixon character tropes seriously but plays them for laughs, making a deeply self-serious schemer appear as a lovably deluded curmudgeon. “I’ve got a way with young people — they trust me,” says the target of a thousand anti-Vietnam student rallies. I also love the suggestion that Nixon’s famous paranoia was the result of too many hash cookies.

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Harry Shearer In Nixon’s The One (2012-13)

Shearer always provided the Nixon impressions on The Simpsons – remember the pig with powerful friends? He stars in this TV play based on the weirder bits of Nixon’s White House tapes, which were first made public in 1996. Filmed as a one-off in 2012, using 12 hidden cameras in a replica Oval Office set, it’s since been expanded into a five-part series.

Shearer has a vague physical resemblance to Nixon, but he’s shrouded in unconvincing prosthetics. His dry, deadpan comedic style is accentuated here by the fact he’s re-enacting Nixon’s words verbatim, down to the ums and aahs. As Shearer says in an interview about the role, his nerdy, granular performance emphasises Nixon’s unexpectedly feminine traits: flirtatious hand gestures, pouts and fluttering eyelids. “To me that’s one of the features that never comes through in a lot of the fictional depictions of him,” Shearer says, “This physical thing that seems to be at war with what he’s saying out of his mouth.”

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Robert Wisden In Watchmen (2009)

A comic-book movie demands a comic-book look and a comic-book performance. This stupid mash-up video is the only example of Wisden’s performance I can find on YouTube, but Wisden makes a great fist of the slurred, plummy speech and belligerent attitude that we recognise from the older Nixon.

I like Watchmen’s alternate-history premise: that with the aid of atomically reconstituted superbeing Dr Manhattan, Nixon was able to win Vietnam and rewrite the US Constitution to secure himself further terms, so in 1985 he’s still incumbent, along with the paranoid, insular culture he epitomises. Much as Watchmen blends superheroism with realpolitik, Wisden’s Nixon is both absurd and oddly believable.

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Frank Langella In Frost/Nixon (2008)

Like Shearer, Langella has the unenviable task of recreating previous Nixon recordings — in this case, very well-known ones. For obvious reasons, he was always going to be compared to the archival recordings of David Frost’s 1977 interviews.

I’m not a fan. Langella looks much more like Ronald Reagan to me. His Nixon voice is pretty crappy too, although he shakes them jowls for all he’s worth. But it almost doesn’t matter. Langella still exudes a certain Nixon-ness — an intense determination to assert his moral rightness — that makes this performance compelling.

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Anthony Hopkins In Nixon (1995)

This biopic, the second of Oliver Stone’s ‘presidency trilogy’ (the others being JFK and W), is terminally tasteful. Hopkins has studied Nixon’s mannerisms, especially his vocal cadences and his weird way of baring his teeth in an unsmiling grin. But he just looks wrong for the part, and his American accent can’t quite shake that soft Welsh lilt.

Perhaps it’s the slicked-back hair or the dead-eyed look from those brown contact lenses, but Hopkins brings an unfortunate intertextual psychopathy from his previous role in The Silence of the Lambs — his Nixon is Hannibal Lecter in the White House.

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Beau Bridges In Kissinger And Nixon (1995)

Based on Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger biography, this telemovie has all the stodge that comes from trying to be historically worthy. But there’s something uncanny about its vision of Nixon and Kissinger’s work dynamic as they sought to end America’s military involvement in Vietnam.

Basically, the problem is the mountain of latex obscuring the features of both Ron Silver as a gravel-voiced Kissinger and Beau Bridges as Nixon. It’s hard to tell if Bridges is well or poorly cast. His likeable, avuncular screen presence — which would have been intriguingly sympathetic here — is completely erased by this Polar Express shit. Honestly, Point Break’s Nixon-masked bank robber felt more realistic.

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John Cusack In The Butler (2013)

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (aka ‘Forrest Gump’s The Butler’) was a risibly sentimental take on African-Americans’ changing proximity to power during the last 60 years. It was full of hilariously ill-judged presidential stunt-casting: Robin Williams as Eisenhower; James Marsden as JFK; Liev Schreiber as LBJ; and, of all people, Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan.

However, the worst in show had to be Cusack. Surely this not only surpasses X-Men: Days of Future Past as the worst Nixon impression committed to film, but also represents Cusack’s career nadir. He does an embarrassingly unconvincing impression of Nixon’s vocal mannerisms (“Do you really want that spoiled, rich sonofabitch fuck to be your next president?”). More preposterously, he just looks like John Cusack with a stupid fake nose.

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