Scott Speedman

Scott Speedman was born in London and raised Canadian, modelled, and then spent four seasons on Felicity as Ben Covington, one half of the most argued-over love triangle on late-nineties American television. That role would have set most actors up for a decade of romantic leads. He did not take them.

What he took instead was Underworld, which made him an action lead in a franchise about vampires and werewolves and asked almost nothing of him beyond conviction, and then a long series of small, dark, unglamorous films: My Life Without Me, Dark Blue, Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster, The Monster, The Captive. He is unusually willing to be unpleasant or weak on screen, which is rare in an actor who looks like that, and it has almost certainly cost him a bigger career.

The Strangers is the one that has aged into a genuine horror standard, and his performance is a large part of why. He plays a man in a broken relationship reacting to a home invasion with entirely believable incompetence, and the film is frightening in direct proportion to how ordinary his mistakes are. David Cronenberg later cast him in Crimes of the Future, which fits, because Speedman has always been better at unease than at heroism.

Television has been the steady employer. He was Baz Blackwell on Animal Kingdom, Matthew Engler in You, and returned to Grey's Anatomy in 2021 as a main cast member after a guest run as Dr. Nick Marsh in the fourteenth season. In 2026 he leads R.J. Decker.