Alex O'Loughlin
Alex O'Loughlin is an actor, born 1976.
Canberra born and trained in Sydney at the National Institute of Dramatic Art, O'Loughlin worked in Australian film and television before American networks found him. The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant (2005) gave him Will Bryant in a convict escape story, and the film Oyster Farmer (2004), which is not among the credits listed here, is the early one Australian critics still bring up.
Two American leading-man vehicles followed, both cancelled. Moonlight (2007 to 2008) cast him as Mick St. John, a vampire working as a private investigator, and lasted a single season. Three Rivers (2009 to 2010) made him a transplant surgeon and did not last much longer. Either could have been the career. Instead they were the audition.
Hawaii Five-0 was the payoff, from 2010 to 2020 as Steve McGarrett. That show asks for a specific and unglamorous skill: a lead who can carry procedural exposition, hold a franchise together week after week and still suggest damage under the competence. He is good at stillness and better at withheld anger than at charm, which is why the romantic comedy work, The Back-Up Plan in particular, sits awkwardly next to the rest of it.
The films around all this are mostly genre and mostly minor: Whiteout, The Invisible, Man-Thing, Feed, and a walk-on in The Holiday.
Movies (7)
TV (4)
Where to start with Alex O'Loughlin
For sheer volume there is Hawaii Five-0: a decade of television, easy to sample at any point, and the clearest picture of what he does for a living. Pick a season opener and see whether the register suits you.
The stronger argument for him is Moonlight, a much odder show than its premise suggests, which gets more out of him in one season than the procedural managed in a decade. Three Rivers is the other short-lived lead, earnest medical drama, mainly interesting as the road not taken.
For the pre-America work, The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant is harder and colder than anything he did on American network television. Of the films, Whiteout and The Invisible are watchable genre filler, The Back-Up Plan is a romantic comedy he is miscast in, and Man-Thing can be skipped without loss.