T. J. Scott

T. J. Scott is a Canadian director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and former stuntman whose career has spanned stage, film, and television. His Broadway work includes an appearance in Night and Day in 1979.

Scott transitioned into film directing in the early 1990s, making his feature debut with the action-science fiction martial arts film TC 2000 in 1993. Later in the decade, he directed Legacy (1998), a film starring David Hasselhoff and Victoria Pratt that screened as the opening night selection at the Las Vegas Film Festival in 1999. In 2000, Scott wrote, directed, and produced the HBO film Blacktop, starring Kristen Davis.

His television directing career gained momentum through work in New Zealand alongside producers Robert Tapert and Sam Raimi on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which ran from 1995 to 1999. Scott subsequently directed episodes of the spin-off series Xena: Warrior Princess (1996–2001), followed by episodes of Cleopatra 2525 (2000–2001) and Mutant X (2001–2002). He also directed an episode of the ESPN series Playmakers (2003) that the American Film Institute named one of the top ten television episodes of that year.

Scott directed the Discovery Channel television film Deadliest Sea in 2009, which earned five Gemini Award nominations in 2010, including one for Best Direction in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series. Throughout the 2010s, he directed episodes of numerous series, among them Spartacus, Bitten, Longmire, Gotham, The Strain, and Dark Matter. His work on the BBC America series Orphan Black brought him significant recognition, and in February 2015 he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Direction in a Dramatic Series at the third annual Canadian Screen Awards ceremony. His direction of the CBC miniseries Caught earned him a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Direction in a Dramatic Program or Limited Series in 2019. He also directed episodes of Star Trek: Discovery and Taken during this period.

From 2019 to 2021, Scott served as both sole director and executive producer across three seasons of Departure, a British-Canadian co-production commissioned by Global Television Network and later acquired by NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock for a September 2020 release. The series starred Archie Panjabi, Christopher Plummer, Claire Forlani, Kris Holden-Ried, Rebecca Liddiard, and Shazad Latif, and averaged more than one million viewers per episode during its initial Canadian and UK broadcast. Plummer's performance in the second season was his final on-screen work before his death on February 5, 2021. In 2022, Scott received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Dramatic Series as one of Departure's executive producers.

Beyond directing, Scott co-wrote the story for the 2015 film Tracers, starring Taylor Lautner. In September 2011, filmmaker Chris Columbus was announced as the director attached to Scott's screenplay The Secret Lives of Road Crews for Paramount Pictures. Scott also served as executive producer on the web series Teenagers from 2015 to 2017 and works as a freelance writer and photographer. He married Canadian actress and model Victoria Pratt in 2000; the two divorced in 2016.