David Krumholtz

David Krumholtz is an American actor born on May 15, 1978, in New York City, where he grew up in the borough of Queens. The son of Michael Krumholtz, a postal worker, and Judy Krumholtz, a dental assistant, he was raised in a working-class Jewish household. His paternal grandparents had emigrated from Poland, and his mother relocated from Hungary to the United States in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution. Krumholtz attended P.S. 196, Stephen A. Halsey Junior High School 157, and briefly Forest Hills High School.

Krumholtz entered the entertainment industry at age thirteen when he followed friends to an open audition for the Broadway play Conversations with My Father in 1992, winning the role of Young Charlie alongside Judd Hirsch, Tony Shalhoub, and Jason Biggs, who was also making his Broadway debut at the time. The stage work led quickly to film roles, including parts in Life With Mikey (1993) with Michael J. Fox and Addams Family Values (1993) with Christina Ricci. His performance in Life With Mikey earned him a Young Artist Award nomination in 1993. He became widely recognized among younger audiences for playing the sarcastic head elf Bernard in The Santa Clause (1994) and its sequel The Santa Clause 2 (2002). Although a scheduling conflict and reservations about the direction of the character kept him out of The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006), he reprised the role in the Disney+ series The Santa Clauses in 2022.

Throughout the 1990s, Krumholtz accumulated a range of film credits, appearing in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), and the teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), in which he played Michael Eckman opposite Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That same year he portrayed Yussel, a young Jewish man, in Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights (1999), a role that brought him to the attention of filmmaker Edward Burns, who subsequently cast him in Sidewalks of New York (2001). His television work during this period included a co-starring role in the short-lived series Monty (1994) with Henry Winkler, as well as guest appearances on ER, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Freaks and Geeks, and Undeclared, among others.

Krumholtz took on leading roles in the early 2000s, including Big Shot: Confessions of a Campus Bookie (2002), which premiered on FX and was based on the Arizona State University basketball point-shaving scandal of 1994. He played Benny Silman, a campus bookmaker who was jailed for his involvement in the scheme. He also appeared in Ray (2004) and began his long association with the Harold & Kumar franchise, playing Goldstein across three films from 2004 to 2011. In September 2005, he appeared as Mr. Universe in Joss Whedon's science fiction film Serenity. His most sustained television success came with the CBS drama series Numb3rs (2005–2010), in which he starred as Charlie Eppes, a mathematician who assists his FBI agent brother, played by Rob Morrow, in solving crimes. The series also featured Judd Hirsch, reuniting him with Krumholtz years after their Broadway collaboration. CBS cancelled the show on May 18, 2010.

In the years following Numb3rs, Krumholtz appeared in a succession of film and television projects. He wrote and co-created the IFC comedy series Gigi Does It (2015), in which he played the title role of an elderly Jewish woman while wearing heavy prosthetics. He took on supporting roles in the Coen brothers films Hail, Caesar! (2016) and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), as well as Sausage Party (2016) and Wonder Wheel (2017). On television, he played adult filmmaker Harvey Wasserman in the HBO drama series The Deuce across its first two seasons before becoming a series regular in the third, and portrayed Monty Levin as a series regular in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America (2020).

Krumholtz returned to Broadway in the fall of 2022, joining the original cast of Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt at the Longacre Theater, where he played Hermann Merz in the semi-biographical Holocaust drama. The role earned him a Drama League Award nomination for Outstanding Performance. The following year, he portrayed physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi in Christopher Nolan's biographical drama Oppenheimer (2023).

In his personal life, Krumholtz married actress Vanessa Britting at the Plaza Hotel in New York City on May 22, 2010, having been engaged since July 2008. The couple have a daughter and a son, both born in the 2010s, and relocated from Los Angeles to Wyckoff, New Jersey in 2017. In July 2011, Krumholtz was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and began radioactive iodine treatment five months later. He was pronounced cancer-free at the end of January 2012.