John Getz

John Getz is an American actor born on October 15, 1946, in Davenport, Iowa, where he grew up in the Mississippi River Valley. One of four children, he is the son of William and Kay Getz; his father ran a heavy-machine company, and his mother's family had roots in the construction industry. Getz was raised in Moline, Illinois, and attended Moline High School, where he swam competitively. He later enrolled at the University of Puget Sound, where he turned to theater partly as a way to avoid continuing on the swimming team. He subsequently attended the University of Iowa with the intention of joining its Writers Workshop and pursuing a career in writing and teaching, but his involvement with the university's theater department redirected him toward acting.

Following his university years, Getz joined the American Conservatory Theater and spent a year performing with a touring company. He was among the founders of a theater company in Napa Valley before relocating to New York, where he performed in East Village productions and served as an understudy for Lincoln Center's Shakespeare Festival. His stage work eventually brought him to Broadway, where he appeared in M. Butterfly in 1988.

Getz made his film debut in The Happy Hooker in 1975 and went on to star in the Coen Brothers' neo-noir thriller Blood Simple in 1984, playing a man entangled in a fatal affair with a married woman portrayed by Frances McDormand. He appeared in two television series sharing the name "Maggie": the 1984 series Maggie Briggs, in which he played newspaper editor Geoff Bennett, and the 1998 series Maggie, in which he played Dr. Arthur Day. In 1985, he co-starred in the police drama MacGruder and Loud, which aired its pilot in the post-Super Bowl time slot before ABC repeatedly rescheduled it and ultimately moved it to a Monday night 10:00 pm ET slot.

Getz portrayed science magazine editor Stathis Borans in both The Fly (1986) and The Fly II (1989), a character whose curiosity carries severe physical consequences. In 1989, he also played a Marine Corps Major in Born on the Fourth of July. The following year he appeared as a crime boss in Men at Work, the Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez comedy, and in 1991 he took roles in both Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead and Curly Sue. He appeared in the 1994 film Playmaker alongside Colin Firth and Jennifer Rubin.

Getz worked with director David Fincher on two projects: the 2007 film Zodiac and The Social Network (2010), the latter depicting the founding of Facebook. Also in 2007, he appeared in the documentary Nanking, directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, portraying George Ashmore Fitch, who served as head of the local YMCA and administrative director of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. In 2012, he appeared in the suspense thriller Elevator, written and produced by Marc Rosenberg and directed by Stig Svendsen, playing a Wall Street executive among a group of strangers trapped in an elevator with a person carrying a bomb. He portrayed director Sam Wood in Trumbo in 2015.

His television work spans several decades, beginning with a guest appearance in the 1977 Barney Miller episode "Atomic Bomb" and a 1980 role in Three's Company as Lee Tripper, the brother of Jack Tripper. He has guest-starred in series including How I Met Your Mother, Prison Break, The King of Queens, and Private Practice, and held recurring roles in Homeland from 2014 to 2017, Timeless from 2016 to 2018, Bosch from 2017 to 2018, and the Netflix series A Man on the Inside in 2024.

Getz married playwright Grace McKeaney on January 3, 1987; she has a daughter.