"Tobin was the guy laying facedown for seven days. He just laid in that pool of blood. It was never like, 'Oh, I gotta lay here.' It was like, 'That's what I gotta do... I lay in the pool of blood.'"
— David Armstrong, Director of Photography on Saw
Tobin Bell (born Joseph Henry Tobin, Jr., August 7, 1942 in Queens, New York) is an American actor best known for portraying John Kramer in the Saw franchise. An off-Broadway theater veteran, he did mostly background work for the first part of his screen career, and had settled into a character actor role in the 1990s, only for Saw to catapult him to the status of horror icon.
Filmography
Film
- Mississippi Burning (1988) as Agent Stokes
- An Innocent Man (1989) as Zeke
- Goodfellas (1990) as Parole Officer
- The Firm (1993) as The Nordic Man
- In the Line of Fire (1993) as Mendoza
- The Quick and the Dead (1995) as Dog Kelly
- Best Of The Best Without Warning (1998) as Lukasz Slava
- The Road to El Dorado (2000) as Zaragoza
- Saw as John Kramer/Jigsaw:
- 12 Feet Deep (2017) as McGradey
Television
- The X-Files episode "Brand X" (2000), as Ashman
- The Sopranos episode "Army of One" as Maj. Carl Zwingli
- 24 as Peter Kingsley (Season 2)
- Charmed (1998) as Orin.
- The Kill Point as Alan Beck
- The Flash (2014) as Dr. Alchemy/Savitar (Voice)
- Creepshow episode "Grey Matter" as Chief Connors
- MacGyver (2016) as Leland (Season 4)
Tropes associated with Tobin's performances:
- Harpo Does Something Funny: Tobin will often write his own dialogue for Jigsaw, or at least be allowed to tweak the script to his liking. He's even been known to help design traps to make them more thematically relevant.
