Martin Henderson
Martin Henderson is an actor, born 1974.
Henderson left New Zealand with a genuine teen-idol profile, built on Stuart Neilson in Shortland Street from 1992 to 1995, and spent the next decade being offered the American leading-man career rather than getting to keep it. The Ring in 2002 was the big one, and he is good in it, playing sceptical and ordinary against a film that is neither. Windtalkers the same year, then Torque and Bride & Prejudice, where he was the Darcy figure, in 2004.
Those studio attempts did not stick, and the more interesting work happened at the edges. The Australian drama Little Fish in 2005 has a cast far better than its profile and the best film acting on this list. Battle in Seattle, Devil's Knot and Everest, where he played the climber Andy Harris, all put him in ensembles rather than at the front.
Television is where the career actually settled, and there is no shame in it. Off the Map in 2011, then Nathan Riggs on Grey's Anatomy from 2015 to 2017, and then Jack Sheridan on Virgin River from 2019, a role that has run for years and found a very large audience by doing the least fashionable thing available: being sincere.
He has also gone back and forth to Australasian television, on The Gloaming and My Life Is Murder, which suggests a fairly clear-eyed view of what a working actor's life looks like.
Movies (15)
TV (9)
Where to start with Martin Henderson
Pick your lane, because these are two different actors. For the film work, Little Fish is the one worth hunting down: a small Australian drama, an unshowy performance, and easily the most he has been asked to do.
For the thing he is famous for, The Ring holds up better than most American horror remakes of its era, and his ordinariness is exactly what the part needs. Everest is the best of the ensemble pictures.
Television splits neatly. Virgin River is the comfort watch and the reason he has the audience he has now, unashamed romance played entirely straight. Grey's Anatomy is the higher-wattage version of the same appeal. The Gloaming is the correction if you want to see him do something cold and strange, and Off the Map is the short-lived curiosity in between.