Edward Allen Harris (born November 28, 1950) is an American actor and filmmaker. His performances in Apollo 13 (1995), The Truman Show (1998), Pollock (2000), and The Hours (2002) earned him critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations.
Harris has appeared in several leading and supporting roles, including in The Right Stuff (1983), The Abyss (1989), State of Grace (1990), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), The Firm (1993), Nixon (1995), The Rock (1996), Stepmom (1998), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Enemy at the Gates (2001), A History of Violence (2005), Gone Baby Gone (2007), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), Snowpiercer (2013), Mother! (2017), The Lost Daughter (2021), and Top Gun: Maverick (2022). In addition to directing Pollock, Harris also directed the Western film Appaloosa (2008).
In television, Harris is notable for his roles as Miles Roby in the miniseries Empire Falls (2005) and as United States Senator John McCain in the television movie Game Change (2012); the latter earning him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film. He starred as the Man in Black in the HBO science fiction-Western series Westworld (2016–2022), for which he earned a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series.
Early life
Harris was born at Englewood Hospital in Englewood, New Jersey, and was raised in the New York City suburb of Tenafly, New Jersey, the son of Margaret (née Sholl), a travel agent, and Robert L. "Bob" Harris (1922–2014), who sang with the Fred Waring chorus and worked at the bookstore of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has an older brother, Robert and a younger brother, Paul. Harris was raised in a middle-class Presbyterian family. His parents were from Oklahoma. He graduated from Tenafly High School in 1969, where he had played on the football team and served as the team's captain in his senior year.
A star athlete in high school, Harris played varsity football at Columbia University and was a teammate of future United States Attorney General Eric Holder. At Columbia, where he said he succumbed to the "Morningside Heights blues" after two years, he was a resident in Carman Hall. When his family moved to New Mexico two years later, Harris followed, having discovered his interest in acting in various theater plays. He enrolled at the University of Oklahoma to study drama. After several successful roles in local theaters (such as the Jewel Box Theater in Oklahoma City), he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts, where he spent two years and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1975.
