More than three decades after Bill Paxton was first cast in a Western that never got made, his son James has stepped into the role his father was meant to play. “Last Train to Fortune,” a comedy-drama originally written for Paxton in 1991 opposite Malcolm McDowell, arrives on VOD Nov. 6 with James Paxton, 32, in the lead.
The film’s path to the screen was long and interrupted. Bill Paxton was cast alongside McDowell in 1991, but the project stalled after original director Lindsay Anderson died in 1994. Efforts to revive it picked up again in 2017, with Adam Rifkin set to direct and Brad Wyman producing, but Bill Paxton died that February following heart surgery before the film could move forward. Financing problems kept delaying production until McDowell, Rifkin and Wyman eventually approached James, who said he hadn’t even known about the project while his father was alive. According to Rifkin, the film finally secured financing once James signed on.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, James described taking on the role as a way of staying connected to his father.
“When you lose somebody, such a close loved one, you often look for ways to still connect to them,” James said. “For me, I recognized immediately that this was the kind of project that I could literally hear my dad in my head the whole time.”
He recalled his father’s own explanation for why he followed him into acting. “Dad had this metaphor about if this was 100 years ago, and we were a family of shoemakers or cobblers, my father before me was a shoemaker and his father before him, you’d probably go into the family business and become, hopefully, a good shoemaker,” James said. “So I’ve always held that close.”
The movie also carries personal weight for director Adam Rifkin, whose late mother, Michele Rifkin, wrote the original script for a PBS screenwriting competition in 1986. She was too ill to visit the set but saw James and McDowell in costume over FaceTime during filming. “She told us that when she saw us in costume it was like we had walked right out of her imagination up off the page and into the real world,” James recalled. “That was so touching, and it immediately made me think about my dad in that moment.” Michele Rifkin died shortly after, having seen the finished film before its private release.
A California friendship
Bill Paxton and Malcolm McDowell were neighbors in Ojai, California, and their bond extended well beyond the film business. James recounted a story McDowell recently reminded him of, from a wildfire that threatened McDowell’s hillside property in the early 2000s.
“Malcolm had a property that was kind of up in the hills, backing up against a lot of wildlife, ground, and forest. And the fire was coming up on his property, and he said that he saw Dad show up in full volunteer fireman regalia, like the full suit, ready to fight the fire with Malcolm,” James said.
James said McDowell’s wife, Kelly, sent him a photo of the two men taken during the firefighting effort. “I loved the thought of them working together on something outside of film, in real life,” he said.
Making the role his own
James said his father always encouraged him to approach acting as his own craft rather than an extension of Bill’s career. “It was totally important for me to create my own version just because I know what Dad would tell me,” he said. “He goes, ‘You’re your own actor. You’ve been studying this. You’re a professional.'” James said his father told him to focus on the character rather than the family connection: “It’s the character’s moment to live, it’s Jedediah Dooley’s moment to come to life. So it’s not James up there, it’s not Bill up there, it’s the character.”
James also recalled his father pushing him toward discipline and real-world experience growing up, including jobs scooping ice cream, working for UPS and apprenticing as a tile maker. He remembered Bill warning him about the difficulties of a Hollywood career. “He always talked about it’s the time between jobs where you really can suffer,” James said. “‘The death of a thousand paper cuts,’ he would call it. You have to find something that can buoy you between jobs, and you don’t put your self-worth in it.”
James made his breakthrough in the USA Network series “Eyewitness” in 2016, a role his father saw before he died. He has since built a career with more than 45 acting credits, including appearances in “Training Day,” “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Tacoma FD,” “The Cleaner” and a 2024 cameo in “Twisters,” the sequel to his father’s 1996 film “Twister.”
Asked what would make his father most proud, James pointed to persistence through hard times. “I think he’d be most proud that I have never given up,” he said. “You’ve got to recognize the blessings and the privilege and keep it going. He’s like, ‘I set this up for you.’ And so I just want him to know that I’m always gonna honor what he gave me.”
“Last Train to Fortune” is available on VOD beginning Nov. 6.
