Lance Henriksen

Lance Henriksen is an American actor born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan, New York, who appeared on Broadway in 1977 in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

Henriksen's father, James Henriksen, was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer who went by the nickname "Icewater" and spent the majority of his life at sea. His mother, Margueritte Werner, worked variously as a dance instructor, waitress, and model. His paternal grandmother was a Sámi reindeer herder. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and his mother struggled to support him and his brother Walter, a situation that led to Henriksen spending part of his childhood in foster care. He left school after completing only first grade and remained illiterate until the age of 30. He has described being physically assaulted by multiple family members during his childhood and recounted leaving home at age 12.

Before entering acting, Henriksen worked as a muralist and as a laborer on ships, including a period working in Europe. Around the age of 30, he found work in theater as a set designer and received his first acting role as a direct result of having built the set for a production. It was during this period that he taught himself to read, initially recording an entire script on tape with the assistance of a friend in order to learn his lines. He subsequently graduated from the Actors Studio and began his acting career in New York City.

His first film appearance was an uncredited role in The Outsider in 1961. His first credited film role came in It Ain't Easy in 1972. He auditioned for the role of Leon Shermer in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) but was cast instead as an FBI agent. He went on to appear in two additional films directed by Sidney Lumet: Network (1976) and Prince of the City (1981). His Broadway credit, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, came in 1977, the same year he appeared in the science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also appeared in the horror film Mansion of the Doomed (1976) and Damien: Omen II (1978).

Henriksen played Police Chief Steve Kimbrough in Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1982), a production on which he first worked with director James Cameron. Cameron originally envisioned Henriksen for the title role in The Terminator (1984), though the part ultimately went to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Henriksen appeared in the film as Detective Hal Vukovich of the Los Angeles Police Department. He portrayed the astronaut Walter Schirra in The Right Stuff (1983) and actor Charles Bronson in the television film Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story (1991).

Henriksen became closely associated with the Alien franchise through multiple roles across several films. He played the android Bishop in Aliens (1986), Bishop's designer Michael Weyland in Alien 3 (1992), and Charles Bishop Weyland, the human upon whom Bishop was modeled, in Alien vs. Predator (2004). Along with Bill Paxton, he is one of only two actors whose characters have been killed by the Terminator, the Alien, and the Predator across separate films. Additional film credits include the vampire film Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the Westerns Dead Man and The Quick and the Dead (1995), Hard Target (1993), Color of Night (1994), Powder (1995), Scream 3 (2000), Appaloosa (2008), and Falling (2020). He also made a cameo appearance as The King in Super Mario Bros. (1993).

In 1996, Henriksen took on the lead role of Frank Black in the television series Millennium, created by Chris Carter, who developed the character specifically for him. Frank Black is a former FBI agent with the ability to perceive the psychology of killers. The series ran from 1996 to 1999, and Henriksen's performance earned him three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Series, covering the years 1997 through 1999, as well as a People's Choice Award nomination for Favorite New Male TV Star. He reprised the role of Frank Black in a 1999 episode of The X-Files. He won a Saturn Award for his performance in Hard Target, out of four total Saturn Award nominations. In 2021, he received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Actor for his work in Falling.

Henriksen has maintained an extensive voice acting career. In Disney's Tarzan (1999), he voiced Kerchak, the ape who functions as Tarzan's surrogate father, and reprised the role in the direct-to-video follow-up. He voiced the character Molov in Red Faction II (2002), contributed to GUN (2005) and Run Like Hell (2002), and voiced Admiral Hackett of the Human Systems Alliance in the Mass Effect role-playing game series (2007–2012), reprising the role in Mass Effect 3. He voiced Lieutenant General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), provided the voice of Brainiac in Superman: Brainiac Attacks (2006), and voiced the character Andrei Rublev in Cartoon Network's IGPX in 2005. He also lent his voice to the character Lockdown in Transformers: Animated and voiced Master Gnost-Dural in Star Wars: The Old Republic. On television, he appeared in the Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Into the West (2005), guest-starred on NCIS in 2009, appeared in the Brazilian soap opera Caminhos do Coração from 2007 to 2008, and held a recurring role as The Major on NBC's The Blacklist.