WENTWORTH MILLER PROFILE

WENTWORTH MILLER

PROFILE:

Famous as Actor
Popular for As Michael Scofield in Fox Network's TV series "Prison Break" (2005)

Birth Name: Wentworth Earl Miller III
Bate of Birth : 2 June 1972
Height: 6' 1" (1.85 m)
Eyes color: grey
Natural hair color: brown
Place of Birth: Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Nationality: British
Nicknames: Stinky, Went, Miller
Astrology Sign: Gemini
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Education: Midwood H.S. at Brooklyn College (Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Graduated from Quaker Valley High in 1990
Graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English Literature

Wentworth Miller Family
Father Wentworth Earl Miller II
Mother Roxann
Sister Gillian (younger, lawyer), Leigh (younger)

Biography:

Every once and a while, an actor appears in a role that seems tailor-made. For Wentworth Miller, that role came when he was cast as young Coleman Silk in The Human Stain (2003), a race drama about a man (the older version played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) hiding the true nature of his identityone born from a white mother and black father. Millers own background was a mirror image of the character, which naturally gave him an edge on the competition despite his sparse resume. Prior to his feature debut, Miller paid his dues in small unforgiving roles on various television shows. Eventually, Miller began appearing in more prominent parts, including the lead role on the escape drama, Prison Break (Fox, 2005- ), an action-packed series that had set him up to become a breakthrough star.

Though Miller was born in Chipping Norton, England, where his father was a Rhodes Scholar, he grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, back when it was far less trendy. The cultural diversity of his neighborhood allowed him to ignore issues of racewith so many around and within him, Miller never really thought much about it. His family later moved to Sewickley, Pennsylvania where he attended Quaker Valley High School his senior year. After graduation, he attended Princeton and majored in English. Though he loved acting and appeared in school productions since he was in kindergarten, Miller blenched at the prospect of pursuing acting in the business-oriented climate of the Ivy League school. Upon graduation in 1995, Miller moved to Los Angeles and began his entertainment career as a lowly assistant at a development company, presumably to put his Princeton degree to good use.

Working at the development company rekindled his desire to act, however, and later, while working behind the counter at a Borders Bookstore, he began going on auditions. Three years after landing in Los Angeles., he got his first role on an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB-UPN, 1996-2003), then went on to a recurring role on the short-lived Fox series, The Time of Your Life (1999-2000), a spin-off from Party of Five (Fox, 1994-2000) starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. In a 2000 episode of ER (NBC, 1994- ), he played a high school quarterback injured in a student riot. After another recurring role on the teen comedy Popular (WB, 1999-2001) was cut short, Miller appeared as a waiter in Room 302 (2001), a short film featured in Showtimes 9th annual Black Filmmaker Showcase. An appearance in the cliché-ridden miniseries, Dinotopia (ABC, 2002), a CGI fantasy about a lost continent where humans and dinosaurs co-exist peacefully, added a majoralbeit cheesyrole to his resume.

In 2003, Miller was set to make a major breakthrough after being cast as a younger version of Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain. Miller had an intense personal connection to the racially ambiguous characteras a person of mixed racial make-up, he ran into trouble for making derogatory, though misconstrued, remarks about African-Americans, much like the character in the movie. While a junior at Princeton, he published a cartoon in the Daily Princetonian featuring Cornel West, then professor of African-American studies who was hired away by Harvard, as teaching white students a class called Rhythm Why None of You Have It, and How You Can Get It. The cartoon also referred to West as newly-purchased, an innocent academic term for newly hired that was taken as a reference to slavery. The New York Times ran a story, novelist Toni Morrison wrote an angry letter and Millerdespite his racial backgroundwas considered a campus racist. And like Coleman Silk, Miller refrained from revealing his true nature.

After filming the movie, Miller wrote a letter to West apologizing for the cartoon, but it went unanswered. West was, however, a friend of actress Anna Deveare Smith, who played Silks mother, and showed up at the premiere. He unexpectedly gave Miller a bear hug and all was well. The film, on the other hand, did not fair so wellit made a paltry $5 million at the box office despite the star power of Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Meanwhile, Miller had a small supporting role in, Underworld (2003), a sci-fi thriller about a secret war between vampires and werevolves. But the weak showing of The Human Stain forced Miller to take a step back to reevaluate his life and career, leaving him without an appearance in 2004. He did make a strong comeback in 2005, starting with the music video for Mariah Careys We Belong Together, in which he steals the singer away from Eric Roberts at the alter. Not exactly a shining moment, but it got him back into circulationrepeatedly on VH1, at least.

After a couple of episodes on Joan of Arcadia (CBS, 2003-2005), he gave his best HAL impression in the big budget bomb, Stealth (2005), voicing EDI, the onboard computer of a runaway aerial combat plane equipped with nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence gone haywire. Miller then landed the role of Michael Scofield on the Fox series, Prison Break, playing a structural engineer who robs a bank in order to get arrested and placed in the same prison as his brother (Dominic Purcell), a wrongly-accused death row inmate. Despite criticism for stretching the boundaries of plausibility, the show was hailed for its suspense and excitement. The show made an impressive debut, pulling 10.5 million viewers its first night and holding 8.5 million its second episode. Meanwhile, he appeared in the pilot episode of The Ghost Whisperer (CBS, 2005), which was set to air late September.

QUOTES

• "When I got to college, acting suddenly seemed like a very risky proposition and all my friends were going to law school or med school or Wall Street."
• "You might look at my CV and see I've had 12 jobs, but I've been to over 450 auditions so I've heard 'no' a lot more than I've heard 'yes'. So if I go in looking only to meet my own standards, then that will make taking that rejection a little bit easier. And when I do get that job it will seem like icing on the cake."
• "The show is completely preposterous. But that aside, it's a great ride."
• "My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong".
• "I have a little fantasy where in the last episode of the season, we slip into the prison's sewer system, up through the grate, and pop out a hatch - and we're face to face with Matthew Fox and spend season 2 on a tropical beach." - jokingly linking his show, "Prison Break" (2005) to "Lost" (2004)
• "My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities."
• "I'm kind of a dork. I don't have much game. I'm not particularly comfortable in bars or clubs. I much prefer being home playing Scrabble, having dinner with a couple friends, going to see a movie, or losing a whole weekend to Season 14 of "Law & Order" (1990) or "The Simpsons" (1989).
• "I made a decision not to work out because I'm lazy and also, the character is not a superhero. I didn't want him to be a buff guy with Jackie Chan moves because the point is he's smarter than your average Joe" - on playing "Michael Scofield" with his regular physique.
• When asked what character from literature he would like to play: "Well, if we can expand the definition of literature to include comic books, I'd definitely love a crack at "General Zod" from "Superman". So I'm hoping that Bryan Singer makes a sequel to the "Superman" that's coming out and casts me" (TV Guide, April 10-16,2006).
• "A lot of what's going on The Human Stain because of my own memories and experiences."
• "I feel extremely lucky, extremely grateful, and a little bittersweet, too."
• "I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. There is the sense of being between communities."
• "I rented every Anthony Hopkins film available. And Hopkins met me halfway, like they put a mole on his left temple like the one I have. Hopkins was able to watch home movies of me when I was younger as well."
• "I worked with the same trainer that worked with Denzel Washington in THe Hurricane. It was three months of training, five days a week, 4 to 5 hours a day. This was followed by a month of choreography."
• "I'm pretty much a couch potato."
• "I've been spoiled by this project. I was given the script and went in to read, realizing that this was a powerful story and one that wasn't told very often."
• "You have to love what you do, and you have to need it like you need air. And there's nothing else that would give me the same degree of satisfaction as acting, which is why I can't walk away from it.

Milestones

(2001) Acted in the short "Room 302"; aired as part of 'Showtime's Black Filmmaker Showcase'
Cast in the recurring role of Adam Rothschild-Ryan on "Popular" (The WB)
(2005) Cast on the FOX drama, "Prison Break," as a man who gets himself sent to prison to help his falsely accused brother escape death row; earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor
(2003) Feature film debut as the younger version of Anthony Hopkins's character, Coleman Silk in "The Human Stain"
(2002) Had leading role as the fearful David in the ABC-Hallmark miniseries "Dinotopia"
(1999) Had recurring role on the Fox series "The Time of Your Life"
(1998) Made TV acting debut in a small part on the WB series "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer"
(2000) Made memorable guest appearance on NBC's medical drama "ER," as a quarterback whose injuries lead to a riot
Moved to L.A. after graduating from Princeton in 1995
Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y.
(1996) Worked as a production associate on the CBS miniseries "Gone in the Night" and the CBS movie "Vows of Deception"

Filmography

Actor:

1. "Prison Break" .... Michael Scofield (57 episodes, 2005-2008)
2. Prison Break: The Road to Freedom (2007) (TV) .... Michael Scofield
3. "Ghost Whisperer" .... Sgt. Paul Adams (1 episode, 2005)
4. Stealth (2005) (voice) .... EDI
5. "Joan of Arcadia" .... Ryan Hunter (2 episodes, 2005)
6. The Confession (2005) .... The Prisoner/Tom
7. Underworld (2003) .... Dr. Adam Lockwood
8. The Human Stain (2003) .... Young Coleman Silk
9. "Dinotopia" (2002) (mini) TV mini-series .... David Scott
10. Room 302 (2001) .... Server #1
11. "ER" .... Mike Palmieri (1 episode, 2000)
12. "Time of Your Life" .... Nelson (2 episodes, 1999-2000)
13. "Popular" .... Adam Rotchild Ryan (2 episodes, 2000)
14. Romeo and Juliet (2000) (V) .... Paris
15. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" .... Gage Petronzi (1 episode, 1998)
- Go Fish (1998) TV episode .... Gage Petronzi

Miscellaneous Crew:

1. Vows of Deception (1996) (TV) (production associate)
2. Gone in the Night (1996) (TV) (production associate)
3. Shaughnessy (1996) (TV) (production associate)

Self:

1. Reinventando Hollywood (2008) (TV) .... Himself
2. "Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show" .... Himself (2 episodes, 2004-2007)
3. Making of 'Prison Break' (2006) (V) .... Michael Scofield
4. "Richard & Judy" .... Himself (1 episode, 2006)
5. "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" .... Himself (1 episode, 2006)
6. "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" .... Himself (1 episode, 2005)
7. "Making a Scene" .... Himself (1 episode, 2005)
8. "The Sharon Osbourne Show" .... Himself (1 episode, 2003)
9. Discovering Dinotopia (2002) (TV) .... David Scott / Host
10. Evolution: The Making of 'Dinotopia' (2002) (TV) .... David Scott

Archive Footage:

1. De 'Los Serrano' a 'Cuenta atrás' (2007) (TV) .... Michael Scofield
2. "Video on Trial"
- Episode #1.3 (2005) TV episode (uncredited) .... Himself