Movies

Michael Anthony Hall (born April 14, 1968), known professionally as Anthony Michael Hall, is an American actor. He is best known for starring in films with John Hughes, which include the teen classics Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science.

Hall diversified his roles to avoid becoming typecast as his geek persona, joining the cast of Saturday Night Live (1985–1986) and starring in films such as Out of Bounds (1986), Johnny Be Good (1988), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993). After a series of minor roles in the 1990s, he starred as Microsoft's Bill Gates in the 1999 television film Pirates of Silicon Valley and starred in the 2001 comedy film Freddy Got Fingered. He had the leading role in the USA Network series The Dead Zone from 2002 to 2007. In 2008, he appeared in a minor role in The Dark Knight. Since 2019, Hall has appeared in ABC's The Goldbergs. He starred in the slasher film Halloween Kills (2021).

Early life
Hall was born on April 14, 1968, in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. He is the only child of blues-jazz singer Mercedes Hall's first marriage. She divorced Hall's father, Larry, an auto-body-shop owner, when their son was six months old. When Hall was three, he and his mother relocated to the West Coast, where she found work as a featured singer. After a year and a half, they returned to the East, eventually moving to New York City, where Hall grew up. Hall's ancestry is English, Irish and Italian. He has one half-sister, Mary Chestaro, from his mother's second marriage to Thomas Chestaro, a show business manager. His half-sister is pursuing a career as a singer under the name of Mary C. Hall uses the name Anthony, rather than Michael. He transposed his first and middle names when he entered show business because there was another actor named Michael Hall who was already a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Hall attended St. Hilda's & St. Hugh's School of New York before moving on to Manhattan's Professional Children's School. Hall began his acting career at age eight and continued throughout high school. "I did not go to college," he has said, "but I'm an avid reader in the ongoing process of educating myself." Through the 1980s, Hall's mother managed his career, eventually relinquishing that role to her second husband.