Jonathan Banks

Jonathan Ray Banks, born January 31, 1947, in Washington, D.C., is an American actor who grew up in Chillum, Maryland. His father worked as a civil servant, and his mother held positions as a secretary in various federal government offices, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and served as a private secretary to several senior Naval officers, among them Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; she also held a professorship at Indiana State University. Banks completed his secondary education at Northwood High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, before enrolling at Indiana University Bloomington, where he and fellow student Kevin Kline were classmates and appeared together in a production of The Threepenny Opera. He also performed the role of Anthony Anderson in The Devil's Disciple during his time there, an experience he has credited as transformative. Banks departed Indiana University before completing his degree to pursue a career in theater, subsequently joining a touring company of Hair as a stage manager and traveling with the production to Australia and New Zealand.

His Broadway career includes an appearance in 1974 in A Little Night Music. That same year, his most prominent theatrical credit was the role of Frid in the United States tour of the musical. Also in 1974, Banks relocated to Los Angeles, where he continued working in theater while taking on small film and television roles. His early screen appearances included supporting parts in the crime film Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), the murder-mystery The Cheap Detective (1978), the war film Coming Home (1978), and the musical drama The Rose (1979). During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, he appeared in a number of television films, including The Girl in the Empty Grave (1977), The Ordeal of Patty Hearst (1979), She's Dressed to Kill (1979), Rage (1980), and Desperate Voyage (1980).

Throughout the early 1980s, Banks accumulated a substantial list of film credits, appearing in Airplane! (1980), Stir Crazy (1980), 48 Hrs. (1982), Frances (1982), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Gremlins (1984), Buckaroo Banzai (1984), and Armed and Dangerous (1986). On television, he played Dutch Schultz in the NBC series The Gangster Chronicles (1981) and portrayed the main antagonist in the science fiction series Otherworld (1985). His career reached a significant milestone with his casting as FBI Special Agent Frank McPike in the television series Wiseguy, a role he held from 1987 to 1990. The performance earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. He reprised the role of McPike in a 1996 television film continuation of the series.

Banks gained a new generation of admirers beginning in 2009 with his portrayal of hitman and fixer Mike Ehrmantraut in the AMC series Breaking Bad, starring Bryan Cranston. He entered the series in its second season and became a series regular through the third, fourth, and fifth seasons, which concluded in 2013. His work on the show brought him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series at the 2013 ceremony. During this period he also appeared in Identity Thief (2013) and took on a recurring role as Buzz Hickey in the fifth season of the NBC sitcom Community (2014).

In 2015, Banks reprised Ehrmantraut as a lead cast member in the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, ultimately appearing in 61 of the series' 63 episodes across its run through 2022. He also reprised the character in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019). His performance in Better Call Saul generated four additional Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, at the 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2019 ceremonies. Across his work on Wiseguy, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul, Banks has received a total of six Primetime Emmy Award nominations in that category, making him the only actor nominated as a main cast member on three separate series in the same category, two of which feature him as the same character.

Beyond those signature roles, Banks appeared in the 2017 film Mudbound as the main antagonist, and he and his castmates received a nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Additional film credits from this period include Term Life (2016), Incredibles 2 (2018), and The Commuter (2018). In voice work, he provided the voice of Commissioner Jim Gordon in the video game Batman: Arkham Knight (2015), voiced Filbrick Pines in Gravity Falls (2015), and contributed voices to the Tangled franchise from 2017 to 2020. In 2020, he joined the cast of the Netflix animated series F Is for Family in its fourth season as Bill Murphy. Beginning with the third season in 2025, Banks voices the elderly superhero Brit in the Amazon Prime Video animated series Invincible, and he voices Brian in the fifth season of Phineas and Ferb (2025).

Banks married his first wife, Marnie Fausch, in 1968; the couple had one daughter before divorcing in 1970. In 1990, he married Gennera Gonzalez Cebian, with whom he has fraternal twins, and he also has a stepdaughter from that marriage.