By: Tommy Druen
Guest Columnist
Years ago, I was channel surfing when I stumbled across an old movie called “Murder in Coweta County.” Johnny Cash played a Georgia sheriff, and Andy Griffith—yes, that Andy Griffith—played the villain, a wealthy landowner named John Wallace who thought he was above the law.
I couldn’t look away.
Here was Sheriff Andy Taylor, America’s beloved small-town lawman. Here was Matlock, the folksy defense attorney who always got to the truth. And he was playing a cold-blooded killer who murdered a man and tried to cover it up with the arrogance of someone who’d gotten away with everything his whole life.
The most unsettling part? He was brilliant at it. And it just seemed wrong.
We do this with actors all the time—lock them into boxes based on the roles for which we know them. John Wayne playing Hamlet? Unthinkable. Meryl Streep in a Marvel movie? We’d probably assume we walked in the wrong theater. Once we’ve decided who someone is, we resist seeing them any other way.
But here’s the thing: we don’t just do this to actors. We do it to everyone.
The teacher is always the teacher, even at the grocery store. The boss is always the boss, even at their kid’s baseball game. The clerk, the coach, the pastor, the parent—we see them in their roles and forget there’s a whole person underneath, someone with dimensions we’ve never considered.
I think about Marcel Marceau. Most people knew him as the silent performer in the striped shirt and white face paint. But during World War II, he was a Jewish teenager whose father was captured by the Gestapo and died at Auschwitz. Marcel joined the French Resistance with his cousin and brother, and together they rescued Jewish children across France, leading them to safety in Switzerland.
While he wasn’t a mime yet, he used his innate gift to keep those children calm and silent during the dangerous journey. When they were frightened, when they wanted to cry out, he made them smile without making a sound. The same talent that later made him famous on stages around the world first saved lives in the darkness of war.
We only knew him as the mime. He was so much more. His silence saved them before it ever entertained us.
I remember a moment closer to home that taught me this lesson as well. Two friends, Sarah and Amanda, saw my dad one afternoon. He was a middle school social studies teacher and principal, and Amanda only knew him in that context—dressed in jacket and tie, standing in school hallways, speaking with that particular authority teachers carry.
But Sarah knew him differently. Her father owned the local general store, and she’d seen my dad there countless times in his farm clothes—worn jeans, work boots, and stained shirt.
That day, he was dressed for the farm. Amanda was genuinely surprised. Sarah was not. I heard about it the next day.
Same man. Different contexts. Both equally real.
We see people only as they appear to us in our limited interactions. We forget they go home to full lives we know nothing about. The stern principal coaches his daughter’s soccer team with patience and laughter. The quiet clerk writes poetry. The intimidating boss volunteers at an animal shelter every weekend.
Walt Whitman wrote, “I contain multitudes.” So do all of us.
Andy Griffith could play both the gentle sheriff and the ruthless killer because he contained multitudes, like all of us do. Marcel Marceau was both the entertainer and the hero. My dad was both the principal and the farmer.
The next time you see someone in their uniform—literal or otherwise—remember: you’re watching one scene from a movie you walked into halfway through. The rest of the story might astonish you.
Maybe we need to slow down. Maybe instead of just seeing people, we need to truly know them—to remember that everyone we meet is living a story far bigger and more complex than the single chapter we happen to witness.
