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Bill Sage

Bill Sage has built the kind of career that rewards viewers who pay attention to the edges of the frame. A New York City native, born and raised there, he graduated from the State University of New York at Purchase before establishing himself across independent film, studio productions and television. Sage made his screen debut in Hal Hartley’s 1989 comedy-drama The Unbelievable Truth. That film began a lasting association with Hartley’s distinctive strain of American independent cinema: Sage returned for Trust, Simple Men and Flirt. Those appearances helped shape a career grounded less in conventional leading-man machinery than in character work and recurring creative partnerships. He later played Tom Baker in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, released in 1996, and worked with Harron again in the 2000 psychological horror film American Psycho. Horror has remained another notable part of his screen work. His performances in We Are What We Are and Wrong Turn each earned a Fangoria Chainsaw Awards nomination. Television has given Sage room to move among very different worlds. He has held recurring roles on Nurse Jackie, Boardwalk Empire and Power, and starred in the first season of SundanceTV’s Hap and Leonard. His guest appearances include Sex and the City, Melrose Place, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Third Watch, NCIS, Person of Interest, Orange Is the New Black and The Good Fight, as well as three branches of the Law & Order franchise. Across those projects, Sage’s career shows a steady willingness to move between independent filmmaking, psychological horror, crime drama and episodic television. He is a working actor whose filmography connects the offbeat rhythms of Hal Hartley with some of the darker corners of modern genre cinema and television.