Ted Levine

Frank Theodore Levine was born on May 29, 1957, in Bellaire, Ohio, to Charlotte Virginia (Clark) and Milton Dmitri Levine, both physicians and members of Physicians for Social Responsibility. His father was of Russian-Jewish descent, and his mother had Welsh and Native American ancestry. Levine grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and enrolled at Marlboro College in 1975. He has described himself as a "hillbilly Jew."

Levine built his early professional foundation in the Chicago theatre scene, where he became a fixture and joined the Remains Theatre, a company co-founded by Gary Cole and William Petersen. That stage work led to his Broadway debut in 1985, when he appeared in Biloxi Blues. Through the 1980s, he shifted increasing focus toward film and television, landing a prominent role as mob enforcer Frank Holman in the NBC drama Crime Story, which ran from 1986 to 1988.

His career-defining breakthrough came with the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, in which he portrayed primary antagonist Jame Gumb, also known as Buffalo Bill. The role brought him widespread recognition but also led to a period of typecasting in villainous parts. He gradually expanded his range, taking on a role as a member of Al Pacino's police unit in Heat (1995) and portraying astronaut Alan Shepard in the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. In the drama Georgia, he played Mare Winningham's husband in one of his more sympathetic screen appearances.

In 2001, Levine appeared as Sergeant Tanner, Paul Walker's police superior, in The Fast and the Furious, and provided an uncredited voice performance as sociopathic trucker Rusty Nail in Joy Ride, also starring Walker. His most sustained television role came from 2002 to 2009, when he co-starred as Captain Leland Stottlemeyer opposite Tony Shalhoub on USA Network's detective series Monk. Concurrently, he voiced the supervillain Sinestro across multiple DC Animated Universe productions, including Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited.

Among his other notable film credits are Nowhere to Run (1993), Bullet (1996), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and The Hills Have Eyes (2006), in which he played a patriarch whose family deteriorates over the course of the story. In 2007, he portrayed Sheriff James Timberlake in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and appeared in Ridley Scott's American Gangster alongside Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. He played the warden of the island prison in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and appeared as hunter Ken Wheatley in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018).

On television, Levine played Lieutenant Hank Wade, commander of a homicide unit in a Texas border city, in the FX murder mystery series The Bridge beginning in 2013. He portrayed Thomas F. Byrnes on the TNT series The Alienist from 2018 to 2020, and joined the cast of the ABC drama Big Sky in 2021 as Horst Kleinsasser. Levine has two children, a son and a daughter, with his girlfriend Kim Phillips.