Biography
He has been shot by a T-800, violently torn in two by the Xenomorph Queen, and stabbed by a Predator. Lance Henriksen is a versatile and intense actor known for countless iconic roles in science fiction, horror, and drama. Some of his most iconic roles include the small but pivotal role of the synthetic Bishop in the 1986 blockbuster hit Aliens, and as ex-FBI profiler Frank Black, in the highly acclaimed series, Millennium – which crossed over to The X-Files in 1999 to cap off the storyline.
In film, he started his career portraying a variety of supporting roles in noteworthy genre films such as Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of his earliest lead roles was as Police Chief Steve Kimbrough in James Cameron’s first feature film, Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981) and astronaut Wally Schirra in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983).
After filming Aliens, Henriksen, along with Aliens co-stars Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton, were cast in the cult vampire movie, Near Dark (1987). Over the next decade, he took on a variety of roles in close to 30 features, most notably Ed Harley in Pumpkinhead (1988), a different version of the character Bishop in David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992), and gunslinger Ace Hanlon in Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), Scream 3 (2000), Alien Vs. Predator (2004), and Appaloosa (2008).
Henriksen has lent his distinctive voice to several animated features and TV series including gorilla patriarch Kerchak in Disney's Tarzan (1999), alien supervillain Brainiac in Superman: Brainiac Attacks (2006), the bounty hunter Lockdown in Transformers: Animated, and The Lieutenant in The Legend of Korra. Additionally, he has over a dozen video games to his credit, including the roles of General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Jedi Master Gnost-Dural in Star Wars: The Old Republic, Admiral Steven Hackett in the Mass Effect series, and Jedediah Hackett in The Quarry.