Those watching Amazon’s Legally Blonde prequel series Elle were treated to a surprise recently, as the show offered a posthumous appearance by James Van Der Beek. The actor, who died in February aged 48, had a fun little role as a crooked school district superintendent. As with most of his roles since Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek’s performance was bright and happily self-aware.
However, Van Der Beek is far from the only actor to have appeared on screen after their death. Here are some other standout posthumous performances.
Robert Forster, Better Call Saul
Forster had a small but vital role in Breaking Bad, playing a vacuum cleaner repairman whose side hustle involved hiding wanted criminals from the law. While other actors might have simply used the character as a rote plot device, Forster filled out the role beautifully. He was calm, faintly amused and morally inscrutable. His appearance in Better Call Saul was minor – he briefly agrees to disappear Jimmy McGill – but the groundwork laid in the previous show meant that the cameo felt fully fleshed out.
Miguel Ferrer, Twin Peaks: The Return
The entire series of Twin Peaks: The Return feels slightly elegiac, given the sheer number of actors who died between production and broadcast. Catherine E Coulson, Warren Frost and Marvin Rosand all shot their parts shortly before their deaths. However, as FBI agent Albert Rosenfield, Ferrer had the biggest role of any of them. Age had sanded down some of his character’s rougher edges since the first Twin Peaks was aired, and his performance was so bruised and tender that he was posthumously nominated for a Saturn award.
Carrie Fisher, Catastrophe
When you think of the posthumous roles of Fisher, chances are you’ll think of the nightmarish CGI version of her that Star Wars bodged together to fill in a plot hole in episode nine. But a much better, and much more appropriate, performance came in Catastrophe, where Fisher got to play an actual person. As Rob Delaney’s mother, Fisher was a genuine monster: rude, brittle, unsentimental and extremely funny. She filmed the third series before she died, and its final episode is dedicated to her.
Bernard Cribbins, Doctor Who
Wilf Mott was an extremely important part of Doctor Who lore, a big-hearted optimist who began as Donna Noble’s grandfather, blossomed into the Doctor’s companion and became a kind of father figure to him along the way. Cribbins played Wilf for a final time during 2022’s Wild Blue Yonder, from a wheelchair, just a few months before he died. The performance was absolutely lovely – all involved must have known it would have been his last. It’s hard to think of a better send off for such a beloved actor.
Chadwick Boseman, What If…?
Boseman’s death came as a shock to the entire world, not least because he went out at the top of his game. His final film performance (again released posthumously) in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom won him an Oscar nomination. However, the following year, the voice part he recorded for Marvel’s animated What If…? series came out. Playing Black Panther’s T’Challa, his most iconic role, Boseman gives a wonderfully light and mischievous performance that bears no trace of the illness he was suffering from.
Ray Liotta, Black Bird
Liotta went on a bit of a late-stage tear just before he died, stealing the show in David Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark and winning a posthumous Emmy nomination for Dennis Lehane’s Black Bird. As James “Big Jim” Keene, Liotta plays the father of Taron Egerton’s character, a jailed FBI operative who agrees to go undercover to stop a serial killer. However, he more than makes the role his own. The result – equal parts loving and scary – was arguably his best of all time.
John Spencer, The West Wing
Spencer’s death happened during the production of The West Wing’s final series. As such, the show decided to roll with the momentum and build its big election night episode around it. That in itself was moving, giving cast and viewers alike an opportunity to grieve both actor and character. But Spencer was noticeably frail in the performances he filmed prior to his death, which retrospectively gave his final appearances a sense of inevitability that cannot be faked.
Rob Reiner, Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
We’ll end with the most recent. Rob Reiner’s final screen appearance came seven months after his shocking death, on Larry David’s historical sketch show. It’s a fitting performance, as he plays George Washington, announcing that he would not seek a third term as president in order to preserve the sanctity of the constitution. What follows is several minutes of onlookers – largely David – predicting the rise of Trump many years in the future. As chaos ensues before him, Reiner sighs, “We’re fucked.”
