If you’re a man of a certain age, it’s impossible not to harbor affection for actor Dirk Benedict. While he is a veteran of a number of serious films and impressive stage productions, he’s best known for two roles — Lt. Starbuck, the roguish, cigar-chomping space cowboy always ready with a quip on the original
Battlestar Galactica; and Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck on
The A-Team — not coincidentally, a roguish, quip-ready soldier-of-fortune who had one arm wrapped around the waist of a different babe every week. Neither show lasted very long, but both occupy an outsize place in popular culture.
Benedict wants little to do with Hollywood anymore. Since leaving television, he has written
two books and raised two sons as a single father. However, lately he’s has been contributing to
Big Hollywood, web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart’s new venture dedicated to providing a voice for political and cultural conservatives in the entertainment industry. Benedict has also become known for a sparkling and witty rant against the post-modern and politically correct themes of the wildly popular
Battlestar Galactica remake on the Sci-Fi Channel (a piece you can find on
Big Hollywood here, in all its R-rated glory). It set the blogosphere buzzing, and Benedict the writer now seems to be attracting attention for the very thing he says got him blackballed in Hollywood — his opinions.
“I exiled myself to Montana from Hollywood,” he told
National Review Online. “I once wrote a piece about how I’d joined celebraholics, about how I was trying to regain my anonymity — and if I did one interview, it was like falling off the wagon, and my celebrity would start to come back. Then, the next thing you know, I have an agent and I’m back into it.” But unlike those celebrities who retreat to Rhode Island–sized ranches in the mountains, Benedict came of age 50 years ago in a tiny town in Montana. The self-reliance bred in him is a significant part of his identity, so the West was a natural retreat.
“I grew up without television and without movies. There was barely a newspaper, because it had to come from Helena. You had to follow your intuition and develop opinions that came from you, based on your observations of the world,” he says. This, he soon found, stood out in Hollywood. “Other people in Hollywood have opinions — but they’re somebody else’s opinions. It’s just what they heard somebody say,” Benedict observes.
He’s a Rush Limbaugh listener, but it’s not fair to say that Benedict was ostracized only because of conventional politics. Anyone who has read one of his books knows that he’s led a colorful life and been open to any number of experiences that don’t jibe with the typical Republican profile. As a cancer survivor, he’s an evangelical believer in a macrobiotic diet — and yet he has to pause in mid-sentence to light one of his ever-present cigars. And he’s just as contradictory in his politics, a conservative who once did a film written by Maya Angelou.
What he is is an old-fashioned American individualist. He may not quite be Starbuck or Face in real life, but he’s got something of those characters in him. During his recent appearance on
Celebrity Big Brother, a wildly popular reality-TV show in the U.K., he was greeted by a snotty British punk-rock singer, who announced: “It’s Dirk [expletive redacted] Benedict.” Without missing beat, Benedict replied, “I seldom use my middle name.” It’s an unscripted quip more than worthy of Face or Starbuck.
According to Benedict, it’s no accident that there’s a strong similarity to the characters and his real-life personality — he made them that way. “I had to fight for the cigar, I had to fight for that devil-may-care, loveable scoundrel, I-don’t-give-a-[expletive redacted] attitude,” he says, explaining how he had to get the TV network executives to embrace his version of Starbuck. “It’s a very male thing, and our culture is sensitive to that.”
Of course, his roguish skirt-chasing characters became popular just as Hollywood was undergoing a significant cultural shift: Women were beginning to find a place in Tinseltown. “As more and more women became executives,” he says, “they loved me and they hated me. But when they got power, there was a great joy in being able to tell me what to do when I came in to audition. I think maybe they all had a guy in their past that had some of that in them, and it was revenge.”
Not being able to shy away from such politically incorrect opinions also might have had something to do with his decision to abandon Hollywood for Montana. And Benedict protests that he never had the pathological hunger for fame that characterizes Hollywood’s biggest stars.
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