As reported by AV Club, actor Nicky Katt has died at age 54 of an unspecified cause. While he's better-known to most for a portfolio full of character actor roles, often as a jerk or bully or outright villain in movies like Dazed and Confused, Strange Days, SubUrbia, Boiler Room, School of Rock, The Limey, and Way of the Gun, Katt will probably be known to readers of PC Gamer as Atton Rand in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2.
Fresh off a role as schoolteacher Harry Senate in the first three seasons of Boston Public, Katt played a subversive take on Han Solo in Obsidian's RPG full of subversive takes on Star Wars. While Atton was a sarcastic smuggler and the pilot on your ship, he turned out to have a secret, dark past—as pretty much every character in a Knights of the Old Republic game is required to by galactic law.
Katt made it work, able to portray both the haunted survivor and the snarky fast-talker—if you play a woman, one of his first lines quotes Anakin in Phantom Menace, before immediately undercutting it as a ridiculous thing to say. (It was 2004, making fun of the Star Wars prequels was in.) Though Atton was his only videogame role, Katt turned in the kind of star performance Hollywood never gave him a shot at, with a chance to reveal vulnerability behind the facade. Depending how you play it, he can become your best friend and leave you feeling like a kind of Jedi Giovanni Ribisi.
Katt also played a street-racing thug named Spike in 1997's Batman & Robin and a SWAT driver in 2008's The Dark Knight—he's the guy who says, "What is that, a bazooka?" That means Katt was possibly the only actor to appear in both Joel Schumacher's camp Batman movies and Christopher Nolan's grim-and-gritty Batman trilogy. There's a fact to save for quiz night.
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