Matt Dillon

Matthew Raymond Dillon was born on February 18, 1964, and raised in Mamaroneck, New York, in an Irish Catholic family. His father, Paul Dillon, worked as a portrait painter and sales manager for Union Camp, a packing material manufacturer, and served as the long-time golf coach at Fordham University, where he was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2019. His mother, Mary Ellen, was a homemaker. The second of six children, Dillon has one sister and four brothers, including actor Kevin Dillon. His paternal grandmother was the sister of Alex Raymond, the comic strip artist who created Flash Gordon.

Dillon's path into acting began in 1978 when casting scouts discovered him cutting class at Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont, New York. He auditioned for director Jonathan Kaplan's teen drama Over the Edge and made his film debut when it received a limited theatrical release in May 1979. His performance attracted attention and led directly to two roles released in 1980: the teenage sex comedy Little Darlings, in which his character becomes involved with Kristy McNichol's, and My Bodyguard, where he played a high-school bully opposite Chris Makepeace. Both films performed well at the box office and established Dillon as a prominent figure among teen audiences.

Throughout the early 1980s, Dillon built a substantial filmography that cemented his status as a teen idol. He appeared in Liar's Moon in 1982, playing a poor Texas boy in love with a banker's daughter. That same year he starred in Tex, the first of three S. E. Hinton adaptations in which he would appear. Francis Ford Coppola then cast him as Dallas "Dally" Winston in The Outsiders (1983), a film featuring an ensemble that included Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Diane Lane, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, and Patrick Swayze. Dillon and Lane reunited for Coppola's second Hinton adaptation, Rumble Fish, also released in 1983. All three Hinton films were shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He followed those productions with The Flamingo Kid in 1984.

In 1985, Dillon made his Broadway debut in The Boys of Winter, adding stage work to a career that had been built primarily in film. That same year he was namechecked in the lyrics of Roger Daltrey's song "After the Fire," written by Pete Townshend. In 1989, he earned significant critical recognition for his portrayal of a drug addict in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. He continued working steadily into the 1990s with roles in Singles (1992), To Die For (1995), Beautiful Girls (1996), In & Out (1997), Wild Things (1998), and There's Something About Mary (1998), the last of which earned him an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain.

Dillon expanded his work behind the camera in 2002 when he wrote and directed City of Ghosts, in which he also starred alongside James Caan and Gérard Depardieu. In 2005, he starred in Factotum, an adaptation of an autobiographical work by Charles Bukowski, and appeared in Crash, directed and co-written by Paul Haggis. His performance in Crash earned him an Independent Spirit Award, a Golden Globe Award nomination, and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Also in 2005, he co-starred in Disney's Herbie: Fully Loaded, and on March 11, 2006, he hosted Saturday Night Live. Later that year, on September 29, 2006, he received the Premio Donostia prize at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

Dillon narrated an audiobook version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, voicing the character Sal Paradise, and received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for that work. He also narrated the 2006 documentary Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos. His television work includes the lead role in the first season of the FOX series Wayward Pines in 2015, playing a Secret Service agent across ten episodes, for which he received a Saturn Award nomination. In 2018, he took the lead role in Lars von Trier's thriller The House That Jack Built, and in 2023 appeared in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City. He portrayed Marlon Brando in Being Maria, a biopic about Maria Schneider that premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Beyond acting and directing, Dillon appeared in several notable music videos, including Madonna's Bad Girl, in which he played a detective, and the 1987 Pogues video for "Fairytale of New York," in which he played a cop escorting lead singer Shane MacGowan. In 2007, he directed the Dinosaur Jr. video for "Been There All The Time" and guest-starred on The Simpsons episode "Midnight Towboy." Dillon is also a collector of Latin music, maintaining a large vinyl collection that includes a notable library of Cuban 78s. Over the course of his career he has accumulated accolades that include a Screen Actors Guild Award and two Independent Spirit Awards.