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Adam Arkin

Adam Arkin is the kind of performer who can make intelligence look uneasy. Across comedy, drama and crime stories, he has often brought a dry, watchful quality to characters who may be capable, obsessive, threatening or some volatile combination of the three. Born in Brooklyn on August 19, 1956, Arkin grew up in a performing family as the son of actor, director and writer Alan Arkin and Jeremy Yaffe. His earliest musical experience included singing with his parents in the children’s group the Baby Sitters. By 1975, he was appearing on television in Happy Days and Barney Miller, before taking the central role of Lenny Markowitz in the 1977 series Busting Loose. Television became a major part of his career. He played the mercurial, barefoot chef Adam on Northern Exposure and appeared in Chicago Hope, Frasier, Boston Legal, Monk and Life. Later roles showed how effectively he could darken a story: he played white separatist leader Ethan Zobelle in the second season of Sons of Anarchy and mob boss Theo Tonin on Justified. His film work includes Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Hitch and a sharply placed appearance as a divorce lawyer in Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man. Arkin’s career extends well beyond acting. He has performed on Broadway, off-Broadway and in regional theatre, including productions of Donald Margulies’s Brooklyn Boy. His voice work ranges from Fixer in the radio dramatization of Star Wars to Meriwether Lewis in Ken Burns’s The Voyage of the Corps of Discovery. Behind the camera, Arkin has directed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Boston Legal, Sons of Anarchy, The Blacklist, Justified, The Americans, Masters of Sex and Fargo. He won an Emmy for directing the television film My Louisiana Sky and also served as a co-executive producer on Get Shorty. That combination of actor and director makes sense: whether in front of the camera or guiding a scene, his work is rooted in character, tension and timing.