Reginald Vel Johnson

Reginald VelJohnson, born Reginald Johnson on August 16, 1952, in the Queens borough of New York City, is an American actor whose career has spanned Broadway, film, and television. His father Dan worked as a hospital attendant and his mother Eva as a nurse's aide; his father departed the family, which also included his brother Barry, when Johnson was thirteen. Their mother later married John Reilly. Johnson attended Benjamin N. Cardozo High School before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in theater from New York University, where he trained with Joseph Papp's Black/Hispanic Shakespeare Company alongside fellow actors Morgan Freeman and CCH Pounder. Early in his professional life, he adopted the stage name Reginald VelJohnson, later explaining that he chose the name because he wanted something people would remember.

VelJohnson's stage career placed him on Broadway between 1975 and 1986, with credits that include Honky Tonk Nights, Inacent Black, But Never Jam Today, and a production of Hamlet. His roots in New York theater provided the foundation for a screen career that would come to be defined largely by portrayals of law enforcement figures.

His early film appearances included a brief role as a municipal corrections officer in Ghostbusters in 1984 and a part as a limo driver in Crocodile Dundee in 1986. In Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins in 1985, he played an ambulance driver under the credited name Ivory Ocean. The role that brought him widespread recognition came in 1988, when he was cast as Sergeant Al Powell in Die Hard after Gene Hackman, originally attached to the part, became unavailable and producers opted for a lesser-known actor. The production kept VelJohnson in California for nine months, a stay that ultimately became permanent. He reprised the role of Powell in the 1990 sequel Die Hard 2 and again in the 2002 GameCube video game Die Hard: Vendetta. In 1989, he also appeared alongside Tom Hanks in Turner & Hooch, playing Detective David Sutton, a role he later reprised in Disney's television continuation of the same title.

That same year, VelJohnson was cast as Carl Winslow, a police officer and family patriarch, in the ABC sitcom Family Matters, which later moved to CBS. The series was a spinoff of Perfect Strangers, on which VelJohnson had appeared once. His co-star Jo Marie Payton played his wife Harriette Winslow. He remained with the show for its entire run, which concluded in 1998. Following Family Matters, VelJohnson took on guest appearances across a wide range of television series, including The Equalizer, Diagnosis: Murder, Will & Grace, Monk, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Crossing Jordan, That's So Raven, and Bones, among others. He held a recurring role as Pastor/Brother Haywood on Mike & Molly and appeared as Principal, later Superintendent, Strickland on the Disney sitcom I'm in the Band. In 2008, he appeared as Al Powell in an episode of NBC's Chuck titled Chuck Versus the Santa Claus, in which the character was identified as the cousin of Big Mike. He also had a minor role in the 2002 film Like Mike and played air traffic controller Bob Abbot in the 2012 film Air Collision.

In 2021, VelJohnson voiced Principal Winslow in the animated series Invincible, an adaptation of the comic book in which the main character's high school bears the actor's name and the character itself is named after his Carl Winslow role. He also voiced several additional minor characters in the series. In January 2023, he began appearing in Progressive insurance advertisements as a character called TV Dad, a parody of his Carl Winslow persona. In September 2024, he was announced as a competitor on season 33 of Dancing with the Stars, partnered with Emma Slater; the pair finished in tenth place.

As of 2009, VelJohnson maintained homes in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Los Angeles, with his primary residence in Oceanside, New York. He has never married and has no children.