Lance Henriksen

Lance Henriksen (born May 5, 1940) is an American actor. He is known for his roles in various science fiction, action and horror genre productions, including Bishop in the Alien film franchise and Frank Black in the Fox television series Millennium (1996–99) and The X-Files (1999).^[1]

He has also done extensive voice work, including the Disney film Tarzan (1999) and the video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy (2007–2012). Other film credits include The Right Stuff (1983), The Terminator (1984), Hard Target (1993), Color of Night (1994), The Quick and the Dead (1995), Powder (1995), Scream 3 (2000), Appaloosa (2008), and Falling (2020).

Henriksen was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards for his role on Millenium, and won a Saturn Award (out of four total nominations) for his performance in Hard Target. In 2021, he was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor for Falling.

Henriksen was born on May 5, 1940, in Manhattan, New York. His father, James Henriksen, was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer nicknamed "Icewater" who spent most of his life at sea, while his mother, Margueritte Werner, struggled to find work as a dance instructor, waitress and model.^[2][3][4] Henriksen's paternal grandmother was a Sámi reindeer herder.^[5][6] His parents divorced when he was two years old, and his mother struggled to raise him and his brother Walter, leading to his spending part of his childhood in foster care.^[7][8] During an interview, Henriksen recounted how, at the age of seven, his mother handed him his birth certificate and said, "You'll always know who you are", then pushed him out of his home. Henriksen did not actually leave home until he was 12, saying he'd "had enough" of his home life, and that he had been physically assaulted by multiple family members: "I got bludgeoned a lot. Different people, relatives. I remember every single face from my childhood. My alcoholic uncles, whoever. I'm not having a pity party here; I'm not Quasimodo. That's just how it was".^[9] On another occasion, two of his uncles tried to persuade him to take Methadrine and then take part in a staged car accident for the insurance money.^[8]

Growing up, Henriksen had a reputation for getting into trouble in the various schools he attended, and even spent time in a children's home. He left school after completing first grade, and was illiterate until the age of 30.^[10]

Henriksen found work as a muralist and as a laborer on ships. For a time, he worked in Europe. Around age 30, he found theater work as a set designer, and he received his first acting role because he built the set for a production. It was around this time that he taught himself to read.^[10] For his first role, he put the entire script on tape with the help of a friend, then learned his part and all of the others.^[11] Soon afterward, he graduated from the Actors Studio and began acting in New York City.^[12]

Henriksen's first film appearance was in The Outsider in 1961, as an uncredited extra. He received his first credit in his second film, 1972's It Ain't Easy. He auditioned for the role of Leon Shermer in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but received the smaller part of an FBI agent that kills John Cazale's character.^[13][14] He would appear in two more films directed by Sidney Lumet: Network (1976) and Prince of the City (1981).^[13] In a 2009 interview, Henriksen called Lumet "the kind of guy that loves New York actors, because that's where he works and that's what he knows....He would give you the job that was maybe only meant for four days, and he'd give you the run of the show because he wanted to help support young actors in New York."^[13]

Henriksen had supporting roles in a variety of films, including the science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the horror film Damien - Omen II (1978).^[15] He also had a co-starring role in the low-budget horror film Mansion of the Doomed (1976). He played Police Chief Steve Kimbrough in Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1982),^[15] the astronaut Walter Schirra in The Right Stuff (1983), actor Charles Bronson in the television film Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story (1991), and a cameo appearance as The King in Super Mario Bros. (1993).

When James Cameron was writing The Terminator (1984), he originally envisioned Henriksen, with whom he had worked on Piranha II, as playing the title role, a cyborg.^[16] The role ultimately went to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Henriksen does appear in the film as Hal Vukovich, a Detective in the Los Angeles Police Department.

Henriksen played the android Bishop in Cameron's film Aliens (1986), and as Bishop's designer Michael Weyland in Alien 3 (1992).^[17] He also played Charles Bishop Weyland, the man upon whom Bishop was based, in Alien vs. Predator (2004). Bill Paxton and Henriksen are the only actors whose characters were killed by the Terminator, the Alien, and the Predator. He played the vampire leader Jesse Hooker in Kathryn Bigelow's cult film Near Dark.^[15]

He portrayed gunfighters in the Westerns Dead Man and The Quick and the Dead, and appeared with British actor Bruce Payne in Aurora: Operation Intercept in 1995. That year, he also played Sheriff Doug Barnum in the film Powder.^[18] He appeared with Payne again in Face the Evil (1997), and the dystopian classic Paranoia 1.0 (2004).

In 1996, Henriksen starred in the television series Millennium, created and produced by Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files. Henriksen played Frank Black, a former FBI agent who possessed a unique ability to see into the minds of killers. Carter created the role specifically for the actor.^[19] His performances on Millennium earned him critical acclaim, a People's Choice Award nomination for Favorite New Male TV Star, and three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for Best Performance by an Actor in a TV Series (1997–1999). The series was canceled in 1999. On television, Henriksen appeared in the ensemble of Into the West (2005), a miniseries executive-produced by Steven Spielberg. He appeared in a Brazilian soap opera, Caminhos do Coração (Ways of the Heart) from Rede Record, aired in 2007–2008. Henriksen guest-starred on a Season 6 episode of NCIS (2009) playing an Arizona sheriff, and appeared in a recurring role as The Major on NBC's The Blacklist.

In the years after Millennium, Henriksen has become an active voice actor, lending his distinctive voice to a number of animated features and video game titles. In Disney's Tarzan (1999) and its direct-to-video followup, he is Kerchak, the ape who serves as Tarzan's surrogate father. He provided the voice for the alien supervillain Brainiac in Superman: Brainiac Attacks (2006) and for the character Mulciber in Godkiller (2009). Henriksen is the voice of the character Molov in the video game Red Faction II (2002) and has also contributed to GUN (2005), Run Like Hell (2002), the canceled title Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2004),^[20] and the role-playing game Mass Effect (2007) as Admiral Hackett of the Human Systems Alliance. Henriksen was also the voice behind PlayStation 3's internet promotional videos.

In 2005, Henriksen was the voice of Andrei Rublev in Cartoon Network's IGPX. The actor lent his voice to the animated television series Transformers: Animated as the character Lockdown. In 2009, Henriksen voiced Lieutenant General Shepherd in the award-winning game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. He would later voice Karl Bishop Weyland in Aliens vs. Predator; also, this character's appearance resembles Henriksen's. Henriksen voiced Master Gnost-Dural in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and he also reprised his role as Admiral Hackett in Mass Effect 3. Henriksen reprised his role as Bishop in Aliens: Colonial Marines.

He starred in a 2003 series of Australian television commercials for Visa, titled Unexplained (about the raining of fish from the sky^[21] over Norfolk) and Big Cats (about the Beast of Bodmin Moor). In these commercials, Henriksen speaks as a Frank Black-type character about these phenomena as Mark Snow-inspired mysterious music plays in the background, as a link to Henriksen's TV series Millennium. Unexplained went on to a gold world medal at the 2004 New York Festivals.

He made a cameo appearance in the 2009 horror comedy Jennifer's Body, and starred in the After Dark Horrorfest film, Scream of the Banshee, released in 2011.^[22] He played Henry Gale in Leigh Scott's The Witches of Oz.^[23]

In January 2015, he was signed for the lead in the indie thriller Monday at 11:01 am^[24] In 2016, he starred in the feature film Deserted, a psychological thriller.^[25] Henriksen played the role of Hopper.^[18]

In 2018, Henriksen performed motion capture and vocal performance for the character of Carl Manfred in the video game Detroit: Become Human. The game's plot involves androids gaining sentience and free will, topics explored briefly with Henriksen's Bishop character in Aliens.

In October 2018, Henriksen was signed for one of the two leads in Falling, the directorial debut of actor Viggo Mortensen, who also wrote, produced and co-starred.^[26] Reviewing the film's 2020 premiere, The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore noted not only the quality of Henriksen's performance, but the opportunity Mortensen's script presented: "[F]ew moviegoers who've enjoyed him over the years will be surprised, but many will resent that we, and he, have waited so long for a role like this."^[27]

He received a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Actor at the 9th Canadian Screen Awards in 2021, for his performance in Falling.^[28]

In 2022, Henriksen was cast in the upcoming American horror film, Awaken the Reaper.^[29] The film is currently shooting in New York and slated for a 2024 release date. It is directed by Justin Paul^[30] and Dave Campfield and produced by Fourth Horizon Cinema, Impact Media Studios and Design Weapons.^[31]

Henriksen has been married two times. He was married to Mary Jane Evans from 1985 to 1989 and to Jane Pollack from 1995 to 2006.

Henriksen has one child from each marriage.

Henriksen continues to produce art. He worked as a muralist before he became an actor, and he has worked with clay since 1960. In September 2017, Henriksen set up a website to showcase and find homes for some of his most recent clay works. He "still believes that there is nothing as simple and beautiful as raw clay... And that Potters have the remaining soul of the nomads...always searching...."

Autobiography

• Not Bad for a Human – The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen – Lance Henriksen with co-author Joseph Maddrey, published in 2011 by Bloody Pulp Books, featuring art by Bill Sienkiewicz, Mike Mignola, Tom Mandrake, Tim Bradstreet, Eric Powell and Ashley Wood.

Comic books

• To Hell You Ride (five-issue comic book from Dark Horse Comics) (2012) – Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey (co-authors) with Tom Mandrake (artist); a motion-comic video was also made by Dark Horse Comics) (2012) – Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey (co-authors), Tom Mandrake (artist), Lance Henriksen (narrator), TKU: Tecamachalco Underground (Cesar Gallegos/Mateo Latosa) (musical score)

• Lance Henriksen at IMDb
• Lance Henriksen at the TCM Movie Database
• Lance Henriksen at the Internet Broadway Database
• Films in Review interview Archived September 9, 2018, at the Wayback Machine