Please Rewind Talent Wall

Patrick Dempsey

Patrick Dempsey has built a career on an ease that can turn romantic, guarded or quietly suspicious depending on what a story needs. Born on January 13, 1966, in Lewiston, Maine, he began as a stage performer after successfully auditioning for a touring production of Torch Song Trilogy at 17. Long before that, he competed as a juggler, finishing second in the junior category at the 1981 International Jugglers’ Association Championship. His early film work leaned into youthful comedy and romance, with roles in Can’t Buy Me Love, Some Girls, Loverboy and Happy Together. Yet Dempsey proved increasingly comfortable moving beyond that lane. He played Meyer Lansky in Mobsters, a young John F. Kennedy in the television miniseries JFK: Reckless Youth and Aaron Brooks in Once & Again, earning an Emmy nomination for the latter performance. For Please Rewind viewers, Dempsey appears in Scream 3 as Mark Kincaid, the detective investigating the violence surrounding the production of Stab 3. Kincaid enters a franchise built on mistrust, and Dempsey gives him the right balance of professional composure and possible menace. In a Scream movie, looking helpful is never quite enough to clear anyone. His widest television recognition came as Dr. Derek Shepherd in Grey’s Anatomy, opposite Ellen Pompeo, a role that brought him significant public attention and a Golden Globe nomination. His film career has continued alongside that long television run, including Sweet Home Alabama, Enchanted, Freedom Writers, Made of Honor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Bridget Jones’s Baby, Thanksgiving and Michael Mann’s Ferrari. He also returned as Robert Philip in the Enchanted sequel Disenchanted. That range—from romantic leads and network drama to slashers and sports drama—has kept Dempsey from belonging to just one kind of screen story. Away from acting, he is also a racing automobile driver, making the world of Ferrari an especially fitting stop in a career shaped by both performance and speed.