Inventory: 10 amoral fixers we can't help but love

You got a problem? One that won’t go away? One you don’t want the cops getting wind of? Well, you’d better know a guy who knows a guy, because movies and television will have you believe that only a fixer can make a scandal like this go away. Fixers are anonymous, clear-headed individuals who are called in to maintain an important reputation or clean blood-stained carpets. They will come wearing black gloves and give you a step-by-step process to make sure messy, illicit activities never attract any suspicion, and apparently everybody has one on file: Hollywood, the mob, law firms, even the government.

Smooth-talking, diplomatic, and meticulous criminals appear everywhere in film and TV, and by casting George Clooney and Brad Pitt as two “lone wolf” fixers reluctantly teaming up for a high-profile clean-up, Jon Watts’ Wolfs clearly cashes in on all the outlaw characters these two archetypal A-listers have played throughout their careers. 

Watching a fixer (also known as a bagman or cleaner when focused on more specific tasks) pull off a coverup is satisfying and thrilling to watch when it’s done with finesse, but the real-world version of the stock character is queasy to think about. Why should wealthy people and important institutions get to avoid accountability for acting recklessly and unjustly, just because they want their public-facing image—and by extension, their road to money and power—to stay intact?

Because of the tension between cinematic thrills and their real-world connotations, the amoral nature of fixers often incites ethical and existential crises if they’re leading a film or given an extended arc on television. To celebrate Wolfs tapping into the bruised egos of the fixer community, here are 10 morally dubious fixers we nevertheless love to watch.

1. Michael Clayton (Michael Clayton)

We may never know the extent that Tony Gilroy’s screenwriting talents were parachuted in to tinker with Hollywood productions—we know he did uncredited rewrites on Enemy Of The State and The Woman In The Window, and his influence on Rogue One reshoots (a narrative Gareth Edwards has politely contested) landed him a whole Disney+ series in Andor. But we can infer that his history behind the scenes led to a fascination with faceless, tested fixers who develop a fortified sense of agency. George Clooney’s star power is pushed to its burnt-out extreme as a fixer for a legal firm who becomes compromised by a particularly nasty clean-up job after a colleague (Tom Wilkinson) suffers a mental breakdown. Through Gilroy’s economic, gripping plotting, Clayton becomes a textbook example of how dehumanizing fixer work can be. A fixer needs to repress human compassion so they can stay in their line of work, but so long as they have some kind of heart, enough exposure to corporate and criminal malfeasance will make them reach up for the light.

2. The Wolf (Pulp Fiction)

Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s mega-successful attempt to imbue the archetypes of pulp gangster writing with his own stylistic verve and idiosyncratic personality, and fixer Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe (Harvey Keitel) is the perfect example of someone who is little more than a stock character paired with an incredibly charismatic American actor. The Wolf is a primo fixer who Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) pull away from a fancy card game to clean up their accidental backseat headshot. The tuxedoed, mustached Wolf is completely cool-tempered when dealing with the apologetic, underwear-clad gangsters. Tarantino leans into the scolding parent dynamics of the gangster hierarchy, emphasizing the inconvenience and humiliation of calling in a fixer who is frankly above this innocuous type of mess.

3. Mike Ehrmantraut (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul)

The best consequence of the Prestige TV wave across the industry was that dependable character actors got to strut their stuff with world-class writing, sometimes becoming one of the most recognizable faces on TV. Jonathan Banks had been a reliable face on the small screen and had a decent portfolio of cinematic bit parts, but with Breaking Bad and subsequently Better Call Saul, he was the subject of the most defining modern update to the fixer character. He plays Mike Ehrmantraut, the shrewd bagman and investigator for Gus Fring, a man whose gruff and aggressive exterior conceals a protective, grief-stricken heart. Throughout his ten seasons of screentime, Mike shows some of the most dogged determination of any on-screen fixer.

4. Doug Stamper (House Of Cards)

For six seasons (five if we’re counting the ones people actually watched), the outrageously shady and backstabbing world of D.C. politics was mined by one of Netflix’s earliest original dramas, House Of Cards. Congressman-turned-President Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) wouldn’t have been able to carry out his conspiracy and occasional murder were it not for Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), his loyal Chief of Staff. Doug is a balding, hawk-eyed, soft-spoken man who projects menace in every scene, no matter if he’s going toe-to-toe with bureaucrats who see him as a lap dog or intimidating vulnerable people he sees as nothing more than disposable loose ends. One highlight for the character before the show went off the rails was in Season 3 where, after he was attacked while trying to silence an escort, Stamper is prescribed painkillers that trigger a relapse of his alcoholism. Watching an inflexible fixer succumb to self-destructive urges and have to painfully reconstitute himself is a cathartic and insightful perspective into the seemingly infallible self-control of the character type.

5. Nikolai Luzhin (Eastern Promises)

Detached, calculating protagonists are something David Cronenberg excels at, and when the body horror director pivoted to grounded psychodramas and thrillers in the 2000s, he was just as fascinated by the ways human nature can be contorted. His 2007 gangster thriller Eastern Promises is often considered the apex of his non-genre fiction efforts, which pairs him with Viggo Mortensen (the second of their four collaborations) for a story about a dead trafficking victim’s testimony threatening a close-knit Russian mafia nestled in modern-day London. Mortensen plays Nikolai, a gangster belonging to the Vory, a “thief in law” who serves the older vor Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) as a cleaner for his mafia family. His skin is a canvas for the cartography of symbolic tattoos that map out his allegiances and achievements, but the fact that Nikolai’s true allegiances are kept from us until the film’s final act gives the audience an hour scrutinize just how distant Nikolai is as a person, turning over clues to his empathetic heart and questioning how much the vor title has overridden Nikolai’s sensibilities. Always a good sign when your inner circle fixer tells you, “I am dead already… Now I live in the zone all the time.” This is the kind of existential void that mafia bosses find reassuring.

6. Jackie Cogan (Killing Them Softly)

In anticipation of the boyish competitive tone of Wolfs, Brad Pitt responded to his buddy George’s dour, exhausted fixer performance in Michael Clayton with Killing Them Softly, Andrew Dominik’s neo-noir about a collective of mob gangsters imploding from ill-conceived robberies and paranoid defensiveness. Set during the 2008 presidential election, it’s a gangster flick for recession-era America. The ambiguity of Cogan’s exact expertise is what makes him such a perfect example of a fixer—call him a hitman, an enforcer, a criminal strategist—because his piercing gaze and assertive energy contrasts with the erratic, decentered criminals around him. (The casting of Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini for such a subversive gangster film feels very intentional.) The title refers to Cogan’s ethos for murder, how he dispatches people in a way that removes fear, pain, or panic from the equation—but it’s hard to say whether or not this is more for the benefit of the hitman or his target.

7. Ray Donovan (Ray Donovan)

Poor Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber). He spends his days fixing other people’s problems, but can’t seem to stop everything in his home life from going horribly wrong. Inspired by real-life fixers like Eddie Mannix (more on him later) and Fred Otash, the seven-season (plus one feature-length finale) premium cable treatment of the fixer for the rich and famous indulges in all the gritty crime drama delights of the crisis management subgenre, piling on attention-grabbing celebrity scandals (in all manner of poor taste) while feeding in as much emotional distress as possible. Hey, if you wanted to be a buzzy drama in the post-Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad years, you had to make your protagonist and his world really unpleasant. Bonus points for working in some acute, buried psychological issues—I mean, if your character’s father is played by Jon Voight, you can only imagine how messed up you would be.

8. Olivia Pope (Scandal)

Shonda Rhimes is in the hit-making business, and her totemic political drama Scandal, with its urgent, complex Black female lead and sparky melodrama built on behind-closed-doors bureaucracy, is one of the greatest successes for the Shondaland brand. Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) works high-profile crisis management cases, and in Washington D.C., her services are always in demand. Across the years Olivia Pope ruled the airwaves—throughout her presidential affair and crossover with How To Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating (Viola Davis)—the moral ambiguity of her fixer antics delighted and frustrated viewers. Black women are so rarely seen with such agency and authority on TV, but the double-edged excitement and uncertainty that is baked into the fixer archetype undermines easy praise. How much of an antihero can someone who works to keep the establishment’s image intact be? The personal stakes of Scandal, and how Olivia uses the fixer methodology to get her way, invite a lot more tension than the procedural premise suggests.

9. Kenton (Devs)

A fixer in the Mike Ehrmantraut mold, Kenton (Zach Grenier) is the chief of security at Amaya, the inimitable tech company harboring an impossibly advanced quantum computer at the center of its secretive facility. Kenton may look like the average office janitor, but Grenier plays the ruthless, imposing bagman with a hollowed-out, Cronenbergian heartlessness, which only makes his grumpy worker bee vibe all the more fascinating. Amaya is more public-facing an enterprise than Gus Fring’s criminal empire, but a fixer like Mike Ehrmantraut is still driven by motives we can empathize with: a desperation to provide for his loved ones, to feel like he has a purpose after a life of disgracing himself. Kenton manages to be the more cutthroat fixer even though he’s working for a legitimate company. He feels emblematic of the tech industry commentary laced through Alex Garland’s miniseries, showing the other end of the “ideal employee” spectrum from the tech wizards working in the labs. To a visionary leader like Forest (Nick Offerman), you need to be a genius or an automaton, and Kenton perfectly fulfills the latter expectation.

10. Eddie Mannix (Hail, Caesar!)

There are Coen brothers films where you can vividly picture Ethan and Joel making each other cackle with laughter as they come up with all the gags and hijinks, and Hail, Caesar! is a peak example. Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin, playing a fictional version of a real fixer) is a ‘50s Hollywood fixer. In an industry obsessed with the lucrative value of image, there’s no limit to what studios are willing to do to keep it pristine. The melting pot of celebrities and artists in a conservative decade that precipitated the collapse of Hollywood infrastructure makes for an zippy journey between soundstages, executive suites, and clandestine rendezvous that brushes against how the conflicted, oppressive social and political order of the industry was like a time bomb ticking down to zero. All Mannix can do is cover up tabloid scandals and make sure the starlet gets a front page spread.