Justin Hartley
Justin Hartley is an actor, born 1977.
Three different DC heroes sit on this resume and he is famous for none of them. He was Arthur Curry in an Aquaman pilot the WB never picked up, Oliver Queen across five years of Smallville from 2006, and the voice of Superman in the animated Injustice. Before all that he was Fox Crane on the soap opera Passions from 2002, which is the real foundation: daytime teaches an actor to stay watchable while hitting marks at speed, and it never entirely leaves the performance.
He went back to it, too. Adam Newman on The Young and the Restless earned him a Daytime Emmy nomination in the mid-2010s, and by then he had also done a season of Revenge and a long stretch on Mistresses.
This Is Us is where the career clicked into place, because the show handed him Kevin Pearson, a handsome television actor sick of being cast for his jaw and desperate to be taken seriously. Hartley played the vanity and the self-pity without flinching, and the joke that he was playing himself was both unfair and useful to him. Since then he has fronted the CBS procedural Tracker as Colter Shaw, who finds missing people for reward money, and taken comic supporting turns in A Bad Moms Christmas, Senior Year and Jexi that suggest he would be perfectly happy doing comedy full time.
Movies (15)
TV (8)
Where to start with Justin Hartley
Judge him on This Is Us. Kevin Pearson is handed long stretches of the show's least sympathetic material, an actor complaining about being a famous actor, and Hartley keeps finding the frightened person underneath it.
For the other side of him, Tracker is a comfortable, well-made network procedural with a strong hook, and Smallville is where a generation met him, arriving as Green Arrow to give a tiring show a shot of confidence. Injustice is a strange, bleak animated film and his Superman is the best thing in it.
The comedies are underrated. A Bad Moms Christmas and Senior Year both use him as a punchline about male beauty and he plays along with real timing, while The Noel Diary is the Christmas-romance lane he could work in for the rest of his life.