Lance Henriksen is an American actor known for the android Bishop in Aliens, the grieving father in Pumpkinhead and Frank Black in Millennium.
Quick Specs
| Born | May 5, 1940, Manhattan, New York City |
| Training | the Actors Studio, after starting in off-off-Broadway theatre around age 30 |
| Horror and genre roles | Damien: Omen II (1978), The Terminator (1984), Bishop in Aliens (1986), Jesse Hooker in Near Dark (1987), Ed Harley in Pumpkinhead (1988), Alien 3 (1992), Scream 3 (2000), Alien vs. Predator (2004) |
| Television | Frank Black in Millennium (1996-1999) |
| Voice work | Kerchak in Disney’s Tarzan (1999), Admiral Hackett in the Mass Effect games, General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) |
| Memoir | Not Bad for a Human (2011, with Joseph Maddrey) |
Who He Is
Lance Henriksen’s face has the lines of the life he lived before acting. His father was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer who was mostly at sea. His parents split when he was two, and his mother struggled to raise him and his half-brother. He was in and out of foster care and children’s homes, dropped out after first grade and left home for good at twelve. In his own words: “I got bludgeoned a lot. Different people, relatives… I’m not having a pity party here; I’m not Quasimodo. That’s just how it was.”
He could barely write his name. He signed on to foreign freighters as a deckhand and painted murals in Europe for room and board, sometimes, he said, with shoe polish. In 1970, at thirty, he walked in off the street to audition for a Eugene O’Neill play off-off-Broadway, improvised his way through and got the part. He still could not read it. A friend recorded the whole play on tape, and he listened to it until he knew every role. Then he taught himself to read, using scripts rather than primers. He has said words still feel like a puzzle to him: “I don’t think in words, I think in pictures.”
The Work
His break into film came through New York. Sidney Lumet cast him as an FBI agent in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and again in Network (1976). Spielberg used him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and he played the astronaut Wally Schirra in The Right Stuff (1983). Horror found him early, in Damien: Omen II (1978).
The Movies, and What He Did on Them
The Terminator (1984): James Cameron, who had worked with him on Piranha II, originally imagined Henriksen as the cyborg and drew concept art of him in the part. Arnold Schwarzenegger got the role, and Henriksen played Detective Hal Vukovich instead.
Aliens (1986): Cameron gave him Bishop, the synthetic officer the crew distrusts and who turns out to be the most decent “person” on board. Henriksen has said he studied Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner and Ian Holm in Alien, then decided not to compete with them. “That was me playing myself at 12… except this time I was able to help.” He returned as Bishop’s human designer in Alien 3 (1992) and as Charles Bishop Weyland in Alien vs. Predator (2004). That makes him one of only two actors, with Bill Paxton, whose characters were killed by a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator.
Near Dark (1987): in Kathryn Bigelow’s cult vampire western he plays Jesse Hooker, the hard, weathered leader of a nomadic family of killers.
Pumpkinhead (1988): in the directing debut of effects master Stan Winston, he plays Ed Harley, a country storekeeper whose son is killed by careless teenagers. He calls up a demon for revenge, and then discovers he is bound to it. The film is horror, but Henriksen plays it as grief.
Millennium (1996-1999): Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, wrote Frank Black for him. Black is a former FBI profiler who can see through killers’ eyes, and the role brought Henriksen his widest audience and three straight Golden Globe nominations. He later played Black in a crossover episode of The X-Files.
Since then he has kept working at a pace few actors match: Scream 3 (2000), the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls, a cameo in Jennifer’s Body (2009), and a run of independent horror films. He has also become a busy voice actor, from Disney’s Tarzan to the Mass Effect trilogy and Detroit: Become Human.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- He is a self-taught painter and ceramicist.
- His relationship with reading changed over time. As he put it in 1988, “Now that I have learned to read, I never read for pleasure. Only for work.” By 2011 he said he loved to read and read constantly.
- In 2011 he and the writer Joseph Maddrey published Not Bad for a Human, a film-by-film memoir, through their own Bloody Pulp Books, and he toured conventions to sign it.
Why He Matters
Henriksen is the genre’s great working face: gaunt, watchful and somehow kind. He has played killers, vampires and demon-summoners, but his best-loved roles are men who carry damage and still try to do right: Bishop, Ed Harley, Frank Black. He came to acting with almost nothing, unable to read his first script. Fifty years later he is one of the most recognizable actors in horror and science fiction.