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Alex Winter

Alex Winter has built the kind of career that looks very different depending on where you enter it. For many viewers, he is William “Bill” S. Preston, the cheerfully earnest half of the time-travelling duo in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. For others, he is the filmmaker behind documentaries including Downloaded, Deep Web, The Panama Papers, Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, Zappa and The YouTube Effect. Born in London on 17 July 1965, Winter trained in dance as a child and began acting professionally at ten. His teenage years included supporting roles on Broadway in The King and I, Peter Pan and Close of Play. He later studied film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he met filmmaker Tom Stern and began collaborating on 16 mm shorts. Winter made his feature acting debut in Death Wish 3 and appeared in The Lost Boys before Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure brought him international success alongside Keanu Reeves. He returned for Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey in 1991 and, nearly three decades later, Bill & Ted Face the Music. Bill’s openhearted enthusiasm became Winter’s best-known screen persona, but it represents only one part of his work. His partnership with Stern and Tim Burns led to MTV sketch series The Idiot Box and the 1993 comedy Freaked, which Winter co-directed and starred in. Although Freaked was not widely released at the time, it later developed a cult following. Winter subsequently moved further behind the camera, writing and directing the psychological thriller Fever and directing the live-action television adaptations Ben 10 and Ben 10: Alien Swarm. Documentary filmmaking has become a major strand of Winter’s career, often focusing on technology, media, power and creative lives. Zappa drew on access to Frank Zappa’s archives, while Showbiz Kids examined the experiences of young performers. Across acting, writing, producing and directing, Winter’s career has resisted a single lane—a fitting path for a performer whose most famous character once travelled through history in a phone booth.