John Wesley Shipp
John Wesley Shipp is an actor, born 1955.
Shipp spent his first professional decade in daytime, playing Kelly Nelson on Guiding Light from 1980 to 1984 and Douglas Cummings on As the World Turns from 1985 to 1986, and he won a Daytime Emmy for supporting work in a drama series along the way. Neither soap is among the credits listed here.
In 1990 CBS made him a superhero. The Flash cast him as Barry Allen for a single expensive season, with the pilot and a later two-part story cut into features, and it was cancelled before an audience found it. It has aged better than its reputation: a straight-faced comic-book series made before television had worked out how to do them, more detective show than spectacle.
Dawson's Creek gave him the other role people know, Mitch Leery, the title character's father, from 1998 to 2001. Playing the dad on a series about teenagers is a thankless slot, and he made Mitch a plausible adult rather than an obstacle.
Then the loop closed. The CW cast him in 2014 as Henry Allen, father of a new Barry, on its own version of The Flash, and later used him as Jay Garrick of Earth-3 and as the Barry Allen of Earth-90. Twenty-four years after playing the hero he became the hero's father, then got to be a version of the hero again inside the same franchise. Very few actors get that shape of career, and he plays the older men with a weariness the younger one could not have known about.
Movies (5)
TV (3)
Where to start with John Wesley Shipp
Start with the CW's The Flash, because that is the version people are actually watching and because Henry Allen is the load-bearing emotional wall of its early seasons. Shipp plays warmth without softness, which is harder than it looks on a show this loud.
Then go back to the 1990 CBS series The Flash, a genuinely different object: slower, moodier, closer to a detective show with a costume in it. The feature-length The Flash II: Revenge of the Trickster is the most enjoyable way to sample it in one sitting.
Dawson's Creek is the non-genre credit worth having, and shows what he can do with an ordinary man. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter is the curio. The Flash: Saga of the Scarlet Speedster is for people who have already done all of the above and want him talking about it.