Matthew Modine

Matthew Avery Modine was born on March 22, 1959, in Loma Linda, California, the youngest of seven children. His father, Mark Alexander Modine, managed drive-in theaters, and his mother, Dolores, née Warner, worked as a bookkeeper. Modine is the nephew of stage actress Nola Modine Fairbanks and the great-grandson of prospector and pioneer Ralph Jacobus Fairbanks. The family relocated frequently during his childhood, spending several years in Utah before returning to Imperial Beach, California, where Modine graduated from Mar Vista High School in 1977.

Modine's screen career began in 1983 with John Sayles' Baby It's You, the same year he appeared in the sex comedy Private School alongside Phoebe Cates and Betsy Russell. That year also marked his collaboration with Robert Altman on Streamers, an adaptation of David Rabe's play, for which Modine shared the Venice Film Festival's Volpi Cup for Best Actor with the ensemble cast. Also in 1983, director Harold Becker cast him in Vision Quest, filmed that year and released in 1985. He played Mel Gibson's brother in Mrs. Soffel (1984) and starred opposite Nicolas Cage in Alan Parker's Birdy (1984), which received the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

Modine became widely recognized for portraying U.S. Marine James T. "Joker" Davis, the central character of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket (1987). That same year, he played the character Treat in Alan Pakula's film adaptation of Lyle Kessler's stage play Orphans. In 1988, he appeared as FBI agent Mike Downey in Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob opposite Michelle Pfeiffer. His subsequent film work included leading the cast of Memphis Belle (1990), a fictionalized account of the B-17 Flying Fortress, and starring in the thriller Pacific Heights (1990) as Drake Goodman. He appeared opposite Geena Davis in the action-adventure film Cutthroat Island (1995) and in Robert Altman's ensemble film Short Cuts (1993), in which he played Dr. Ralph Wyman.

His performance as Dr. Don Francis in the HBO film And the Band Played On (1993) earned him both a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Special. His work in Short Cuts brought him a special Golden Globe Award shared with the ensemble cast, and his role in the 1997 television film What the Deaf Man Heard earned him a second individual Golden Globe nomination in the same category.

Modine also pursued work behind the camera. Three short films he produced debuted at the Sundance Film Festival: When I Was a Boy, co-directed with Todd Field; Smoking, written by David Sedaris; and Ecce Pirate, which Modine himself wrote. These preceded his feature directorial debut, If... Dog... Rabbit... (1999). His short film I Think I Thought (2008), in which he also starred, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, and he co-directed Jesus Was a Commie (2011) with editor Terence Ziegler.

On television, Modine played the corrupt developer Sullivan Groff in Season 3 of Weeds (2007) and portrayed Ivan Turing in the TNT supernatural drama Proof (2015). Beginning in 2016, he took on the recurring role of Dr. Martin Brenner in Netflix's Stranger Things, a part he continued through 2025. In 2017, he and his Stranger Things castmates received the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series. His television work also included a guest appearance in The West Wing episode "The Long Goodbye" (2003), in which he played Marco, a character helping C.J. Cregg navigate her father's Alzheimer's disease, and the role of Fritz Gerlich in the CBS miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003).

Among his later film credits, Modine appeared as Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and had a role in Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023). In 2010, he appeared on Broadway in The Miracle Worker, adding a stage credit to a career built predominantly across film and television.