Matthew Modine

Matthew Modine made his film debut in Baby It’s You (1983) and appeared the same year in Private School (1983) and Robert Altman’s Streamers (1983). He starred in Mrs. Soffel (1984) and Birdy (1984), which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by Vision Quest (1985). He gained wider recognition for his role as Private J.T. “Joker” Davis in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). He continued with roles in Orphans (1987), Married to the Mob (1988), and Memphis Belle (1990), as well as Pacific Heights (1990), And the Band Played On (1993), and Short Cuts (1993), earning Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for And the Band Played On.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Modine starred in Cutthroat Island (1995), the television film What the Deaf Man Heard (1997), and Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday (1999). He made his feature directorial debut with If... Dog... Rabbit... (1999) and directed short films including When I Was a Boy, Smoking, and Ecce Pirate. His television work included guest roles in The West Wing (2003) and the miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003). He appeared in Mary (2005), guest-starred in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (2006), and appeared in the HBO film Too Big to Fail (2010).

In the 2010s, Modine appeared in Girl in Progress (2012), Family Weekend (2013), and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012). He appeared in the TNT series Proof (2015) and portrayed Dr. Martin Brenner in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present), winning a Screen Actors Guild Award with the ensemble in 2017. His later film roles included Speed Kills (2018), Foster Boy (2019), Miss Virginia (2019), and The Martini Shot (2021). In 2023, he portrayed Vannevar Bush in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Modine’s theater credits include Arthur Miller’s Finishing the Picture at the Goodman Theatre, Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic, and To Kill a Mockingbird at Hartford Stage and the Gielgud Theatre (2022–2023), in which he played Atticus Finch. He appeared in the Broadway revival of The Miracle Worker (2010) and starred in Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas at the Geffen Theatre (2013). He also directed and appeared in several short films, including I Think I Thought (2008) and Jesus Was a Commie (2011), which screened at international film festivals.