Tom Sizemore

[Mr. Mike]

Tom Sizemore, who appeared in five episodes of season two of the reboot, has passed away after suffering an aneurysm. He played Vincent Fryer, the very nasty boss of Internal Affairs who was hassling Kono (Grace Park) and eventually ended up using her in an undercover capacity. The last name of Sizemore's character, Fryer, was the same as that of the Internal Affairs bigshot in the original show's tenth season episode The Friends of Joey Kalima, who hassled the title character of that show, also a rookie cop, in a very aggressive fashion.

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/t...sm-1235538021/

[ringfire211]

Sizemore had lots of issues in real life from what I’ve read.

[Bobbi]

I didn't see Sizemore's turns on the reboot. Alan Oppenheimer set the bar pretty high concerning Fryer.

[Mr. Mike]

I just finished reading Sizemore’s 2013 autobiography, By some miracle I made it out of there. His life was a real mess, he was a major dope addict (meth, cocaine, heroin and more) and his choice in girlfriends included “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss, who accused him of domestic violence in 2003, which ended up with him sentenced to seven months in jail and four months of drug treatment.

Sizemore talks about his H50 reboot experience almost at the end of the book, saying that it followed his acting in a TV pilot called Exit Strategy, which was never aired. (IMDb lists this show as being from 2015, but it actually predated Sizemore’s appearance on H50.) Sizemore appears to have cleaned up his act while he was on H50, though he had more troubles later on in his life.

“Once Heather [Kadin, an executive producer of Exit Strategy] got the news that Exit Strategy was definitely not going to happen, she asked Peter Lenkov, the director of Hawaii Five-O, if he'd consider writing a part for me into that show. Hawaii Five-O, which was a remake of the original, was a huge hit for CBS and also produced by K/O, the company that made Exit Strategy. Peter liked the idea so Heather set up a meeting for the three of us. I guess she had told him ahead of time that I was going to be really quiet and reserved, because that's how I'd been when I came in for my Exit Strategy audition. But I was in a pretty exuberant mood the day of the meeting and Peter and I really hit it off. Peter had a football in his office and we started talking about how I used to play and even tossed the ball back and forth. I was doing my Robert De Niro impressions and telling stories about shooting Heat and I guess Peter was looking at Heather going, "Where's the quiet guy you'd told me we'd be meeting?" But while we had fun together, the main thing I wanted to do was show him how serious I was about acting again and how hard I would work. He seemed to understand that, and once they got the idea of me appearing on the show approved by CBS, Peter had me written into an episode as a character they'd created for me: Captain Vince Fryer, the head of Internal Affairs.

“When I got to Hawaii to shoot the first episode, I became suddenly very emotional just being on the set of a TV show; seeing the entire crew and this cast of people working together stirred up all of these feelings in me about what I'd lost. I guess Peter wasn't expecting me to be so emotional; he called up Heather and said, "Tom's sort of freaking out. I hope this is going to work." But I shook it off and everything went really well—so well that even though I'd been hired for one episode and that episode had complete closure, they figured out a way to write me into another five.

“The more episodes I was on, the more Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan, the two stars of the show, started pushing Peter to make me a series regular. And though I'm told he very seriously entertained the idea, it would have basically been impossible to continue to come up with reasons to justify having a series regular who wasn't a part of the Five-O team. Honestly, I was happy to be involved at all.

[…]

“I loved everything about the shoot. It was great to connect with Scott Caan, since I'd known his dad, James Caan, a long time—but probably the best part about it was that when they were putting together the episode where my character was getting killed off, they needed someone to play my wife. I suggested Maeve [his ex-wife, from whom he was divorced in 1999 … her part was not in the finished show, but it’s in a deleted scene on the season 2 DVD disc 6, which is about 2½ minutes long]. We hadn't been in touch in a long time but I knew she'd continued to act and had actually moved into producing shows. I was, of course, thrilled when she agreed to sign on and even more thrilled when she came to Hawaii for the shoot. While we didn't have any scenes together, I finally got to sit down with her for the first time in a decade. I'm not going to lie; a large part of me fantasized that now that I was getting a career going again, I could win her back. But I also understood that this was, on a certain level, a fantasy. And just to be around her and have her say that she supported me and that she could see that I was in a good place meant more than I can ever express.

[…]

“[T]he hardest part about acting, for me, is that you're sitting there on a set for fourteen hours only to act for maybe around twenty-eight minutes. So for thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes you're sitting in your trailer, and when you have a mind like mine, that's a very long time to think about a lot of bizarre shit.

“But once I started to realize that things were actually going well, the more positive I felt during my downtime. I still have really bad days where I don't even believe that what's going on is going on. And then I have really good ones. When I watched one of my Hawaii Five-O episodes, I actually sat there and thought, "Wow, I look good—I look like a real movie star again. And I still know how to make bold choices." Of course, you can't make bold acting choices all the time but I still know how to do stuff that makes people go, "I'm willing to continue to watch this guy even if he's talking about banal shit, like the weather."

“Still, sometimes I feel like I'll never escape my past. In September of 2011, when a friend who was staying with me was arrested for erratic driving, the cops came to my place to get him and arrested me as well—claiming that I hadn't finished my community service even though I'd finished it in April and had actually done extra hours. It was all because of some clerical mistake, which I told the police, but they just didn't care. Because I had just started shooting Hawaii Five-O and I knew this wasn't the kind of thing I needed at all, I pleaded with them, saying, "All you have to do is press a button and you can see the truth—I know it's something you can do. And if you arrest me again, I might get fired from my job." They didn't care and I didn't expect them to. Yet it was my first time getting arrested sober and let me tell you, the experience was very different; my fear level was markedly lower because I had nothing to hide. But then, of course, the press got ahold of the information and the headlines read TOM SIZEMORE ARRESTED AT DRUG HOUSE. The truth is that I was arrested at home, I was only in custody for about two hours, and when they found out that I was telling the truth, they couldn't have gotten me out of that jail fast enough.”

[Mr. Mike]

The deleted scene with Fryer's wife can be seen here:

https://fiveohomepage.com/2010-season2/quinlan.mp4