Jeremy Davies
Jeremy Davies is an actor, born 1969.
Jeremy Davies, born Jeremy Boring in California in 1969, got his break in Spanking the Monkey in 1994 and his fame four years later as Corporal Upham in Saving Private Ryan, the translator with no combat experience whose behaviour under fire still divides audiences arguing about that film in car parks.
He acts with hesitation. The stammer, the hands that never settle, the sentence abandoned halfway, the body apologising for occupying space: it is a narrow instrument, and he has spent thirty years proving how much can be built inside it. European directors worked this out early. He is Snow in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, Bill Henson in Dogville and again in Manderlay for Lars von Trier, then back for The House That Jack Built. Werner Herzog put him through Rescue Dawn in a state that is genuinely alarming to watch.
American television then handed him the two parts that made him a cult figure. Lost cast him in 2008 as Daniel Faraday and made his twitchiness structurally important rather than decorative. Justified gave him Dickie Bennett from 2011 to 2015, a grinning, wounded, wholly unpredictable piece of work, and he holds a Primetime Emmy for guest actor in a drama series. He played Charles Manson in Helter Skelter in 2004, and more recently has settled into horror, with Terrence in The Black Phone and its 2025 sequel.
Movies (29)
- Black Phone 2 (2025)
- Saving Private Ryan (1998)
- Secretary (2002)
- The Black Phone (2022)
- Twister (1996)
- The House That Jack Built (2018)
- Dogville (2003)
- Rescue Dawn (2007)
- Solaris (2002)
- Dark Harvest (2023)
- Spanking the Monkey (1994)
- The Infernal Machine (2022)
- Justice League Dark (2017)
- Ravenous (1999)
- Nell (1994)
- Manderlay (2005)
- CQ (2001)
- It's Kind of a Funny Story (2010)
- Helter Skelter (2004)
- The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)
- The Laramie Project (2002)
- Guncrazy (1992)
- The Florentine (1999)
- 29 Palms (2002)
- Intimate Affairs (2002)
- Teknolust (2002)
- Up at the Villa (2000)
- The Locusts (1997)
- Going All the Way (1997)
TV (7)
Where to start with Jeremy Davies
Most people meet him in Saving Private Ryan, and that is the right introduction as long as you watch Upham as a performance rather than as a failure of nerve. Almost nobody else would have played the part that honestly.
The best of him, though, is Rescue Dawn. He is physically wrecked in it, and the performance never once asks for sympathy on those grounds. Follow it with Dogville, where his weakness curdles into something much worse, and Solaris, where he is the only source of oxygen in a very airless film.
On television, Lost made him a fan favourite and Justified gave him a character worth the airtime, one of the great recurring antagonists of that decade. If you want the strange corners, Ravenous is an odd, funny, cannibal-haunted western, and The Black Phone shows him doing a lot with a small, unsettling part.