Spotted something interesting and/or amusing over on Boing Boing yesterday: It’s an image of the card that actor and stand-up comedian Tom Wilson, who played the lunkheaded bully Biff Tanner in the classic Back to the Future movie trilogy, reportedly hands out when he’s approached by BTTF fans, rather than waste time answering questions he’s responded to a million times already:

At first glance, this seems kind of dickish, and that’s apparently how Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing interpreted it (Cory’s comment was “I wonder, though, how many of the fans who approach him with these questions ask them because they really care about the answer, and how many are using the questions as a conversational gambit, and really just want to speak briefly with him because they admire his work?”). However, having talked to a few actors associated with cult and/or genre films in my time, I really can’t condemn Wilson for taking this approach. It’s got to become very tiresome for these people to constantly hear the same old inquiries, especially when they’re all related to a movie they made 25 years ago, and especially when many of the questions aren’t even about them, their roles, or their performances, but instead pertain to bigger stars than themselves or the technical matters of movie-making. But then, my reaction to this may be skewing more sympathetic because I have an idea of the tone Wilson probably intends. Here’s something I first saw a year or two ago but never got around to blogging about, in which Wilson addresses these same questions in a somewhat different format: