Joe Biden
Joe Biden is an actor, born 1942.
This page is a record of a political career caught on film rather than an acting career, and it is worth reading it that way. Biden was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, represented Delaware in the United States Senate from 1973 to 2009, served as the 47th vice president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017, and was the 46th president of the United States from 2021 to 2025.
Every credit here is an appearance as himself, and the great majority is archive footage assembled by other filmmakers for their own arguments. That distinction matters before browsing: a documentary using thirty seconds of a senator at a hearing is not a performance, and it tells you nothing about the man beyond what the editor wanted it to say.
What the list does show is reach. The same figure surfaces in a film about a Supreme Court justice, a film about American drug policy, a film about Silicon Valley fraud, a September 11 retrospective and a filmed inauguration special. Five decades of public life leaves a long tail of footage behind it, and a catalogue like this one is where that tail becomes visible.
Movies (17)
- Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love (2023)
- Crazy, Not Insane (2020)
- Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine (2023)
- Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)
- The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019)
- Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)
- RBG (2018)
- The Words That Built America (2017)
- Celebrating Betty White: America's Golden Girl (2022)
- The House I Live In (2012)
- Two Men at War (2022)
- King Bibi (2018)
- Facing War (2025)
- Monopoly: Who Owns the World? (2021)
- The Undefeated (2011)
- Fall of the Republic: The Presidency of Barack H. Obama (2009)
- Celebrating America (2021)
TV (19)
- Meet the Press (1947)
- Tagesschau (1952)
- Frontline (1983)
- 60 Minutes (1968)
- Kulturzeit (1995)
- Explained (2018)
- Fox News Sunday (1996)
- Jay Leno's Garage (2015)
- TheWeekend (2024)
- The Problem with Jon Stewart (2021)
- The Circus (2016)
- Trailblazer Honors (2014)
- Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (2018)
- This Is Pop (2021)
- Axios (2018)
- Race for the White House (2016)
- Tanner on Tanner (2004)
- Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021)
- First Ladies (2020)
Where to start with Joe Biden
RBG is easily the best film on this list, and his presence in it is incidental: he appears in archive footage from Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Senate confirmation hearings, from his years in the chamber. Watch it for the film, not for him.
The House I Live In is the more uncomfortable and more useful watch, an argument about American drug policy built from political footage of exactly the decades he was legislating in. Fahrenheit 11/9 and Capitalism: A Love Story are Michael Moore films and arrive with Michael Moore's framing attached, which you should factor in either way.
Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror is the long-form history, and Celebrating America is the ceremonial one, of interest mainly as a document of January 2021. There is no performance to evaluate anywhere on this page, and any write-up pretending otherwise is selling you something.