Learning Day: The Works of Graham K. Furness (Patreon)

Alan Moore once said, "there were always three or four people in school who were better than me at drawing, who are now working in shoe factories or mines." He also said, "we should do a graphic novel about prepubescent girls having sex," but that's neither here nor there. The point is, art isn't some mystic act available only to a chosen few. In reality, the majority of people with wonderful imaginations and talents are forced to abandon their gifts in order to make a living assembling iPhones or training AI how to detect human fear.

But sometimes, the impossible happens. The person who has quietly nursed a secret desire to express the contents of their heart through song, paint, or interpretive dance attains enough financial success that they can revisit their passion. Tomima Edmark only ever wanted to write insipid guides to kissing, something that most teens figured out in the '90s either through practical experience or by watching The Red Shoe Diaries. Once Tomima hit it big with the TopsyTail, she was free to write her lists of insane, stupid, and pointless tips on how to press your lips, which are a kind of face meat, against another human's.

In other cases, people don't quit their day jobs but nevertheless find ways to pursue creative work in their downtime. Such appears to have been the story of Graham K. Furness.

From a young age, Graham wanted more than anything to be an actor. Growing up in the 1960s, he was of prime age to have his entire shit transmogrified by Sean Connery's James Bond movies. And transmogrified he was, as he decided that he wanted to emulate his woman-beating hero by playing the kind of suave, sophisticated character he was known for. Maybe just like, 10% swarthier.

And hey, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a cool secret agent. I'd wager those Sean Connery flicks hit young men of the era the same way Clavicular did today's isolated 17-year-olds. These guys were running around martinimaxxing, going Bond mode, hitting their girlfriends, things of that nature.

Of course, as John Lennon once said, "I should 'av fucked me mum." More relevantly, he also said that life is what happens when you're making other plans. By the late '70s, Graham's Bond dreams had faded like the Oedipal fantasies of a world-renowned musician/child neglecter. He was working as a medical tech, "single and free," when he appeared on the British game show Give Us a Clue, which as far as I can tell was just Charades.

He was also booking some legit advertising work, mainly for liquor, "hamberger", and I'm sure there's some kind of cultural specificity I'm missing here, but falling off a log?

Here he is in that Heineken 'Galley Slaves' ad. It's about how Heineken beer gives Roman slaves more energy for rowing than the historic beers which existed at the time.

Graham even appeared as an extra in films like Fortress, The Quest, and something called The Flood: Who Will Save Our Children? Not Graham, sadly, as throughout the '90s he simply couldn't find much call for a heroic Sean Connery type in Hollywood. We already had one, is the thing, even if he was kind of stumbling through the decade like he was hitting the Dewar's 12 a little too hard.

At some point, Graham quit the medical industry and moved to Australia to start building houses. Business was good, and he found success faster than you could say "stereotypical Australian joke here, remember to replace this." But even as he dedicated himself to his new career, he kept the dream alive by appearing on local news segments, Australian TV shows, and The Weakest Link.

His wealth and leisure time accumulating as his construction company grew, Graham eventually realized that he didn't need Hollywood. His was a calling, and he could pursue it regardless of whether the studio bigwigs recognized his work. So decided to do his own thing instead. He started appearing in short films, where he found himself cast in roles like "man," "man," and "drunk man in lift."

He also got on YouTube all the way back in 2007, where he began uploading as many of his old performances as he could dig up. He began with his appearance in a short film about a psychiatric hospital, where he appears briefly as a catatonic ECT patient.

So far, so normal. Graham's would seem to be the story of many an aspiring actor who eventually gives up on the dream of making it big but still does the occasional community theatre or TV spot as an unlicensed alternate universe Jason whose backstory is that he kills people because he's constantly getting wasted.

But pretty soon, Graham started to realize the full potential of YouTube. This was a platform that he controlled. He didn't have to wait to be cast in something to upload a video. He could just do it himself.

Just like Val! Toe to tip, that's a Kilmer. Through the magic of Photoshopping and crude video editing, Graham began uploading videos of himself acting opposite some of Hollywood's greats.

Early efforts were… moderately successful. But Graham applied the industriousness that saw him succeed as a builder to this new pursuit, and his practice yielded results. And he didn't, as you might expect, merely stick to suave, 007-esque characters. He went broad, playing villains...

…reluctant criminals pulled back in for one last job…

…and guys whose entire role in the movie is to tell child Bruce Willis about the various anal cavities that a particular watch has been inside.

Actually, Graham seemed to cast himself mainly in villainous or gangster-type roles. He's only cast himself as James Bond once or twice.

And even when he does do Bond flicks, he's usually playing either M or the bad guy.

Please understand that this isn't just a handful of times that he's done this. Graham K. Furness has over 1000 videos on his YouTube channel. And sure, a lot of them are just him driving around in his nice car or feeding birds.

But there are hundreds of videos of him inserting himself into movies he likes. By all indications, he does not appear to be desperate for work or need the money. This is just something he likes to do, and the biggest concession he will ever make to improving his craft is learning how to green screen himself in front of Tom Cruise.

Generally, he likes playing guys who wear suits, since he seems to own upwards of several anyway.

Graham will do anything for a role, except change his hair or mustache in any way. Here he is playing the famously bald Agent 47 from Hitman.

But, again, Graham clearly doesn't care about making sure that these videos accurately reproduce the original scenes. He doesn't need to get the details of the costume, setting, or props right. It's not about any of that. It's about Graham.

What is most impressive about Graham K. Furness to me is that years into the existence of AI image generators, he has yet to upload a single video where he asked Grok to put him in Heat talking to Al Pacino. Crucially, even the few short videos where his face is pasted into a movie long predate generative AI. This? This is all human ingenuity, baby.

I have to believe that for Graham, using AI would be missing the entire point. His goal isn't the tech-enabled ego masturbation of seeing a terrifying homunculus of himself in a Hollywood picture, it's showing off his talent. His techniques for achieving this have improved a little over the years, but it's still basically the same setup. For that, I applaud him.

And here we've reached the point in this kind of article when the reader expects a twist. And there is one coming, but don't worry — Graham isn't a secret child cannibal or sex criminal. It's much more mundane than that. But before I reveal it, I want to tell you a story.

In my early 20s I read a novel that changed the course of my life. The name of the book isn't important. What's important is that I immediately imprinted on its protagonist, and by extension, its author. I was obsessed with this person and their life experience, and I began modeling myself on them. I started dressing like them, talking like them, writing like them. Eventually, we became friendly acquaintances and ended up in the same room on a couple of occasions, where people couldn't help but remark that I looked like I'd chosen the same character as them in a fighting game and was playing as the slightly recolored version.

I only knew this person as an aspirational figure, someone incredibly cool and mysterious and accomplished, who was just old enough that it seemed they had been around for all of the good times that I felt like I'd arrived on the scene too late for. I thought that if I could only embody this person, become them, then I would shed all my dissatisfaction with myself, all of my self-loathing and anxieties. But it didn't work that way. The closer I got to my ideal, the worse I felt.

The point is this: allowing admiration to slip into imitation is a dangerous thing. At worst, you lose yourself in a role that you can never fully step into. At best, you look faintly ridiculous to everyone around you.

I say all of this by way of explanation that Graham K. Furness doesn't want to play James Bond at all. He wants to be him.

When Graham appeared on the television series First Dates a few years back, he was introduced as "International Man of Mystery," and parodied the Bond opening where he walks out and shoots into the camera.

He rolled up to the restaurant in a sports car then asked the bartender for a vodka martini, shaken not stirred. Bartenders love when you do this, by the way.

What's crazy here is that when they cut back to Graham, he is conspicuously not drinking a vodka martini, meaning one of three things:

1. He already finished it and is on his second drink.

2. The bartender refused to make him one.

3. Immediately after saying that he was like, "uh no but seriously just a beer please."

I can't find the rest of this episode, but I did just notice that when he uploaded the clip, he blurred out his age. Come on, man. The jet black hair and mustache are kind of giving away the game.

Presumably Graham didn't end up finding love on First Dates, because a couple of years later he showed up on Blind Date. By then, he'd had a while to evaluate what he did wrong his first time around on a televised dating spectacle and course corrected.

It wasn't enough Bond! He needed more Bond. He walked onto set in a tuxedo, doing what I would describe to a court as a below-average impression of Sean Connery. When it came time to go on the date, he donned a second tuxedo, did the voice some more, and insisted on taking over from the bartender to make martinis.

And look. It isn't hurting anyone to wear a tuxedo whenever you appear on television, to order vodka martinis, to do your I guess kind of ok Sean Connery impression at every opportunity. The omnipresence of recording devices and the disintegration of social norms has created a world where people feel entitled to post videos mocking anyone who stands out in any way, but I truly believe that people should be actively encouraged in their idiosyncrasies. The alternative is a miserable state of fearful conformity.

But at a certain point, your obsession with being a guy that you're clearly not is getting in the way of you relating to other people.

Graham's date wasn't impressed by this whole ordeal, and why should she be? He was openly inviting comparisons to Sean Connery, comparisons which were inevitably going to be unflattering to him. It's like referencing a good movie in a shitty one — now everyone's just thinking about how much they'd rather be watching Mad Max than Max Hell Frog Warrior.

Of course, it doesn't help that Graham won't stop talking about himself. He is, he admits in an interview shot, "living his Bond fantasy." And obviously, these kinds of shows are made in the cut. But manufacturing a rivalry or making someone look bitchy is one thing — turning someone into a 007 cosplayer is another. That's all Graham.

Again, this doesn't make Graham a bad person per. But it does make him an annoying one, and his is an example we can all learn from. Some dreams, like pursuing acting, are noble and worthwhile. Others, like being James Bond or Naruto or a specific microfamous author, less so. In an era when there are countless images to aspire to, ungodly amounts of money spent telling us that we're not good enough, innumerable people insisting that we need to be rich or do bonesmashing to be lovable, it is extremely difficult to remain true to ourselves. But that is the work.

Alternately, you could always try becoming aggressively indifferent to reality. Dating issues aside, it seems to be working out alright for Graham. As one of his co-stars put it on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (Stand In Edition) — I'm not even going to try to figure out what that is — "none of us have ever met someone so relentless, so oblivious to the things going on around them. There is no way you're ever changing that man. He is a truebred loony."

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neil Schafer, who wonders why Graham spent his whole life chasing James Bond when he was clearly assigned Burt Reynolds at character creation.

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