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Anthony Michael Hall

Anthony Michael Hall built his early screen identity around smart, awkward teenagers, then spent the rest of his career finding ways beyond that familiar outline. Born Michael Anthony Thomas Charles Hall on April 14, 1968, in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, he transposed his first and middle names when another Michael Hall was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild. Hall began acting as a child, appearing in commercials before making his stage debut in 1977 and his screen debut in the 1980 television movie The Gold Bug. National Lampoon’s Vacation brought him wider attention as Rusty Griswold, but his collaboration with writer-director John Hughes established the screen persona audiences still readily associate with him. In Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science, Hall played variations on the bright, socially stranded teenager without treating those characters as simple punchlines. His Brian Johnson in The Breakfast Club, in particular, gave the film’s designated “brain” nervous humor and emotional weight. That success could easily have boxed him in. Hall turned down roles written for him in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Pretty in Pink, choosing instead to move toward action with Out of Bounds. At 17, he also joined Saturday Night Live, becoming the youngest cast member in the show’s history. His adult career has moved between comedy, drama, genre filmmaking and television. He played the hostile Jim in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, portrayed Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley and took on his first regular television role as Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone. Hall also worked as a producer on the series and directed an episode. Later appearances included Gotham City reporter Mike Engel in The Dark Knight, Tommy Doyle in Halloween Kills and Zachary Beck in the third season of Reacher. The shape of Hall’s career is more interesting than a single decade or character type suggests. The quick comic instincts of his early performances remained useful, but his later work has repeatedly made room for authority figures, antagonists and men carrying considerably more menace than the teenagers who first made him recognizable.