Tor Eckman was played by veteran character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, who has an astounding 289 acting credits listed on IMDb in his 40-plus years in Hollywood, starting with the 1977 horror flick "Keep My Grave Open" (which can be seen in its entirety on YouTube). Tobolowsky worked consistently throughout the 1980s, with appearances on hit television shows like "Knots Landing, "Falcon Crest," and "Designing Women" as well as a major role in the 1989 Best Picture nominee "Mississippi Burning."
In the film, which lost out that year to "Rain Man," Tobolowsky plays Clayton Townley, the openly racist leader of the Ku Klux Klan. On a 2012 episode of NPR's Fresh Air, Tobolowsky told host Dave Davies how he approached the task of portraying such an unsympathetic character. "I did not intend to play Clayton Townley as one chromosome short of a human being, like a lot of people will play various villains in movies ... In real life, everyone kind of sees themselves as the good guy, doing what they're doing. They see themselves as a kind of hero, and I wanted to make sure Clayton Townley ... wasn't played as some kind of genetic miscreant."
While the lines written for Townley certainly do not evoke much sympathy from viewers, Tobolowsky's own gentle Southern manner (he was born in Dallas, Texas) manages to show through the character's hateful words and despicably violent actions.
