Eric Johnson
Eric Johnson is an actor, born 1979.
Johnson is from Edmonton and was on screen as a teenager, playing the young Tristan in Legends of the Fall. The job that made him recognisable was Whitney Fordman on Smallville: the high school boyfriend written specifically so an audience would want him out of the way, played with enough decency that the show had to keep complicating him.
He then got a title role, Steven Gordon in the 2007 Flash Gordon series, which lasted one run and is now mostly a trivia answer. What he has done since is more interesting, because he found the thing he is genuinely good at: men whose surface is entirely reasonable. Jack Hyde in Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed works precisely because he plays the first act as a normal boss. Dr. Everett Gallinger on The Knick is a surgeon whose competence and his ugliness sit in the same voice. Chad Mulligan on American Gods is a friendly small-town cop. The corrupt sheriff he plays in Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, described in his own biography as a misogynist, is the same instrument used bluntly.
Underneath all of that is a long, unglamorous Canadian television career that has kept him working for twenty-five years: Luke Callaghan on Rookie Blue, Tracy Crane on Condor, Saving Hope, plus a stack of television Christmas and Valentine romances. He is in I Will Find You in 2026.
Movies (18)
- Fifty Shades Freed (2018)
- Fifty Shades Darker (2017)
- Legends of the Fall (1994)
- A Simple Favor (2018)
- Texas Rangers (2001)
- A Million Miles Away (2023)
- Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)
- Smallville (2002)
- The Work and the Glory III: A House Divided (2006)
- Valentine Ever After (2016)
- The Work and the Glory (2004)
- Call Me Mrs. Miracle (2010)
- Disappearance at Clifton Hill (2020)
- Meteor Storm (2010)
- Fir Crazy (2013)
- Bang Bang You're Dead (2003)
- My Nanny's Secret (2009)
- Fight Another Day (2024)
TV (10)
Where to start with Eric Johnson
Nothing else on his record touches The Knick, a period hospital drama shot like a horror film, in which Gallinger's slide is played without a single moment of self-awareness. Start there.
American Gods is the next stop for the same quality used more sympathetically. If you came from the mainstream side, Fifty Shades Darker is where his villain arrives and the film needs him far more than it admits. Smallville is the nostalgia pick and genuinely a better performance than the part deserved; Rookie Blue is the sturdy Canadian procedural where he spent years being the responsible one. Flash Gordon is for curiosity only, and A Simple Favor gives him a small part in a much sharper film than most of this list.