Jim Parrack
Jim Parrack is an actor, born 1981.
Jim Parrack grew up in Allen, Texas, moved to Los Angeles in 2001 and trained at the Stella Adler Academy and then Playhouse West, which is a longer and more deliberate apprenticeship than most working actors bother with. Early credits are small: the naval-academy drama Annapolis in 2006, a small part on the detective series Raines.
True Blood made his name. Hoyt Fortenberry is the good-natured, slow-witted best friend in a series about appetite and cruelty, and playing straightforward decency in that company is harder than it looks, because there is no irony to hide behind. Parrack does it without making Hoyt a joke, and the show got a surprising amount of pathos out of him.
The theatre training kept surfacing. He played Slim in the 2014 Broadway production of Of Mice and Men alongside James Franco, Chris O'Dowd and Leighton Meester, and around the same stretch turned up in a cluster of American literary adaptations: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Child of God. Film has otherwise mostly cast him as men in uniform, from Battle: Los Angeles to Fury to Suicide Squad, where he is the Joker's henchman Frost, and F9. Since 2020 the steady job has been Judd Ryder on 9-1-1: Lone Star, the longest continuous lead work of his career.
Movies (15)
- Disclosure Day (2026)
- Fury (2014)
- Suicide Squad (2016)
- F9 (2021)
- Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
- Annapolis (2006)
- The Adderall Diaries (2016)
- Wild Horses (2015)
- Priceless (2016)
- Child of God (2014)
- The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards (2015)
- Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee (2007)
- The Sound and the Fury (2015)
- A Night in Old Mexico (2013)
- As I Lay Dying (2013)
TV (7)
Where to start with Jim Parrack
True Blood is where to start, and Hoyt is the reason. He is the one character in Bon Temps with no angle, and Parrack keeps him warm across a series that gets increasingly unhinged around him.
For the current version of the actor, 9-1-1: Lone Star is the long-running procedural where he anchors the firehouse and gets the family material. On film, Fury is the best thing he has been in, a grim tank picture where he holds his own in a crowded crew, and Escape at Dannemora is the most interesting small part, buried in an excellent limited series. Suicide Squad is the one people have seen and the least of him. The wildcard is As I Lay Dying, a Faulkner adaptation that puts the stage training to its proper use.