Ben Foster

Ben Foster has established himself in Hollywood as one of the most versatile actors of his generation. He also adds “producer” to his resume for his recent work on Rampart.

Last year, Foster teamed up with Oren Moverman, who directed Foster in The Messenger, to form the production company Third Mind. Their first joint project, Rampart, in which Foster also appears, is Moverman’s sophomore feature film and stars Woody Harrelson as a veteran police officer who gets caught up in a corruption scandal. The film, part crime drama and part action-thriller, is based on a real LAPD scandal from the 1990s. Rampart recently premiered at the Toronto and London international film festivals and will be released in 2012 by Millennium Entertainment, with an awards-qualifying run in November 2011 in New York and Los Angeles.

Next spring, Foster will appear opposite Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Sir Anthony Hopkins in the indie drama 360, for director Fernando Meirelles. Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play Reigen, the film follows a series of intersecting story lines dealing with love and infidelity. It recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival. Magnolia Films will release the film.

One of Foster’s most acclaimed roles was that of Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery in The Messenger, opposite Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton. The film, a moving portrayal of one soldier’s (Foster) journey to reassimilate into the civilian world after his turn in Iraq, was an official selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and won the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Screenplay and the Peace Film Award at the 2009 Berlin International Film Festival. The film also picked up the Grand Special Prize Award at the 2009 Deauville Film Festival. For his performance, his first lead role in a film, Foster was nominated for the Breakthrough Actor Award by the Gotham Independent Film Awards and was honored at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

In 2007, his portrayal of outlaw Charlie Prince, a cold blooded killer with a pair of deadly six guns and a love for using them in James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma, earned Foster rave reviews. Of his performance, Todd McCarthy of Variety noted that Foster “puts the kind of indelible imprint on this juicy role that, in earlier eras, allowed such thesps as Lee Marvin, Richard Boone, Dan Duryea, James Coburn, Jack Palance, Lee Van Cleef, Strother Martin and others to immortalize themselves in the annals of Western villainy… [he] is a mad delight to watch.” The film’s cast received a Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.

Foster’s credits also include Braden King’s Here; The Mechanic, opposite Jason Statham; Alpha Dog, opposite Sharon Stone and Emile Hirsch; the blockbuster film X-Men: The Last Stand; 30 Days of Night, opposite Josh Hartnett; Hostage, opposite Bruce Willis; The Punisher, opposite Thomas Jane; Northfork, opposite James Woods, Anthony Edwards and Daryl Hannah; and Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights, which marked his film debut.

On the small screen, Foster shared a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series for his work on the 2003 season of HBO’s critically acclaimed drama Six Feet Under, in which he portrayed Russell Corwin for three seasons. He was also a part of the Emmy-nominated HBO telefilm The Laramie Project. He appeared in several episodes of the cult hit Freaks and Geeks as the mentally handicapped student Eli, and Foster’s lead performance in Showtime’s Bang Bang You’re Dead garnered him a Daytime Emmy Award.

Universal Studios