Brendan Hines
Brendan Hines is an actor, born 1976.
Hines is a specialist in men who talk well and should probably not be trusted. Born in Baltimore in 1976, he came up through independent film and theatre and arrived on television in 2008 in two roles that set the template: Tyler Ford on the cult comic adaptation The Middleman, and Andy Goode on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which remains one of the better guest arcs that show produced.
The main cast job was Lie to Me, where he played Eli Loker on a series built around reading people. It is a useful showcase, because the show demanded that its actors perform sincerity and insincerity in the same shot and let the audience decide which was which. After that came a long stretch of recurring parts across network television: Logan Sanders on Suits, Drew Dineen on Scorpion, Detective Ralston on Secrets and Lies, Ethan Reigns on MacGyver, plus arcs on Scandal and Betrayal that are not among the credits listed here.
Two genre regulars gave him more room. Superian on Amazon's The Tick let him play grandiosity completely straight, which is the only way that character works, and Josh Bennett on Netflix's Locke & Key asked for the opposite: quiet, careful, entirely plausible. He also works as a singer and songwriter and has released three albums, and turns up in films including Deep in the Valley and No Way Jose.
Movies (3)
TV (10)
Where to start with Brendan Hines
Give Lie to Me the first evening. It is the show that handed him a full season arc rather than four scenes, and the premise forces every actor in it to work in two registers at once.
For range, put The Tick next to Locke & Key. Superian is enormous, vain and played without a hint of irony; Josh Bennett is small, sad and entirely believable. Same actor, nothing in common.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is the one genre fans still argue about, and Andy Goode is the reason a chunk of those arguments exist. Watch it before anything else on the list if you like science fiction that takes its own premise seriously.
Suits gives him the most screen time of the network procedurals, and The Middleman is the pure cult object here, a comic book show cancelled far too early and beloved by everyone who found it.