Samantha Mathis

Samantha Mathis is an American actress and trade union leader born on May 12, 1970, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. The daughter of actor Donald Mathis and Austrian-American actress Bibi Besch, she grew up largely in the presence of the entertainment industry before relocating with her mother to Los Angeles at age five following her parents' divorce. Despite her mother's efforts to discourage her from pursuing acting, Mathis decided she wanted to become an actress at age twelve and began working professionally at sixteen, with her first job being a commercial for Always Slender Pads – Just for Teens.

Mathis built her early television résumé with co-starring roles on the series Aaron's Way and Knightwatch between 1988 and 1989, and appeared in the television films Extreme Close-up, 83 Hours 'til Dawn, and To My Daughter in 1990. Her feature film debut came that same year in Pump Up the Volume, in which she played Nora opposite Christian Slater, dyeing her natural blonde hair black for the role. She and Slater reunited for voice work in the animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest in 1992, and again as co-stars in John Woo's Broken Arrow in 1996. Her 1992 stage work included an appearance in the play Fortinbras in New York City.

Throughout the 1990s, Mathis appeared in a wide range of film projects. She played Princess Daisy in Super Mario Bros. (1993), a box-office disappointment that later developed a cult following. That same year she co-starred with River Phoenix in The Thing Called Love. She appeared in the 1994 film adaptation of Little Women and in How to Make an American Quilt (1995), both starring Winona Ryder, and played the assistant to the President of the United States in The American President (1995). Mathis took more than a year away from acting after her mother died of breast cancer in 1996. She returned to film with American Psycho (2000), an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel, and starred in Attraction (2000), The Simian Line (2001), and the TNT miniseries The Mists of Avalon (2001).

Her Broadway career spanned from 2002 to 2009. Mathis starred in The Man Who Had All the Luck and later appeared in 33 Variations, in which she played Jane Fonda's daughter. Additional screen credits from this period include The Punisher (2004), in which she starred opposite Thomas Jane, a guest role on ABC's Lost as Olivia Goodspeed, and Atlas Shrugged: Part II (2012). Her indie film Lebanon, PA premiered at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival. In October 2011, she appeared in an off-Broadway production of Love, Loss, and What I Wore at New York City's Westside Theatre.

Mathis took on recurring television roles in subsequent years, playing psychiatrist Alice Calvert on the CBS series Under the Dome in 2013, and joining the cast of the FX horror drama The Strain in 2014 as New York City Councilwoman Justine Feraldo, a role she continued in the series. She also appeared in a recurring capacity on Billions as Sara Hammon, COO of Taylor Mason Capital. In 2019, she appeared off-Broadway in Make Believe, a new play by Bess Wohl staged at Second Stage Theater, in which she played Kate Conlee under the direction of Michael Greif. A musical project, Whisper House, was postponed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beyond her performing career, Mathis has held leadership roles within the entertainment industry's labor movement. She was elected National Vice President, Actors/Performers of SAG-AFTRA in October 2015 and was re-elected to that position in 2017, serving in the role through 2019.

Mathis met River Phoenix while filming The Thing Called Love in 1993 and was present on October 31 of that year when Phoenix collapsed outside The Viper Room in West Hollywood and later died at Cedars-Sinai Hospital of a drug overdose. She spoke publicly about the circumstances of his death for the first time in a 2018 interview with The Guardian, stating that she had sensed something was wrong that night but had not witnessed drug use directly.