Graham Patrick Martin
Graham Patrick Martin is an actor, born 1991.
Martin, from Thibodaux in Louisiana, spent his teens and early twenties being cast as somebody's kid, and got unusually good at the version of that with something wrong underneath. The Bill Engvall Show, from 2007 to 2009, had him as Trent Pearson, the older son in a conventional family sitcom. Two and a Half Men brought him in as Eldridge from 2010 to 2012, a teenager whose stupidity was the joke.
The part that mattered was Rusty Beck. He first played the character, a teenage hustler, in the final episode of The Closer, then carried him through the spin-off Major Crimes from 2012 to 2018, six years of watching a damaged kid slowly turn into a person. Television rarely gives a young actor that much continuous runway, and it is easily the strongest thing on his CV.
He had already taken harder material: Willie Chandler Jr. in the 2007 adaptation of Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, a film about cruelty among children that is difficult to sit through by design. Since Major Crimes the work has spread out, with Ivor Orr in the Catch-22 miniseries, Jasper Simmons in Impastor, and leading roles in small features such as Pursuit, The Line and You Can't Run Forever.
Movies (5)
TV (6)
Where to start with Graham Patrick Martin
Major Crimes is the argument for him and it takes six years to make. Rusty Beck arrives with no reason to trust anybody and is written, very slowly, into an adult, and Martin never plays the improvement as a reward he has earned from the audience.
Two and a Half Men is the opposite and worth seeing for contrast, since Eldridge is written as an idiot and the whole performance is timing.
If you want the difficult one, The Girl Next Door adapts Jack Ketchum and is not an evening's entertainment; he is very good in it and you should know what you are choosing. Catch-22 gives him Ivor Orr in a handsomely made miniseries, Impastor is the broad comedy, and Somewhere Slow is the small indie for anyone completing the set.