Martin Sheen
Martin Sheen is an actor, born 1940.
Born Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez in Dayton, Ohio, in 1940, he took Martin Sheen as a working name and spent the 1960s in theatre and small television parts. The Subject Was Roses (1968) got him seen. Terrence Malick's Badlands got him hired: as a drifter crossing the plains with a rifle and no visible conscience, Sheen underplayed everything, and took Best Actor at San Sebastian for it.
What he does better than almost anyone is authority with a crack running through it. Apocalypse Now (1979) is mostly his face and his voice, a soldier being hollowed out by a river, and it earned him a BAFTA nomination. The same instrument works in miniature: the grinning candidate of The Dead Zone, the plain father in Wall Street who cannot be bought, the straight-arrow captain in The Departed. He can give an order and let you hear the doubt underneath it in the same breath.
Television handed him the part that reorganised the career. As President Josiah Bartlet on The West Wing he found a register nobody had asked him for, professorial and short-tempered and faintly guilty, and won a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild awards across seven seasons. An Emmy for guest work in a comedy came later.
Six decades in, he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame from 1989, three Emmys, and no Academy Award nomination whatsoever; in 2025 The Independent ranked him the greatest actor never to receive one. He works at both ends still, studio jobs like Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man and small ones like The Way, plus seven years on Grace and Frankie as a late-life comic lead.
Movies (73)
- The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
- Catch Me If You Can (2002)
- Apocalypse Now (1979)
- The Departed (2006)
- Spawn (1997)
- Wall Street (1987)
- Dead Presidents (1995)
- Catch-22 (1970)
- Gettysburg (1993)
- The American President (1995)
- Gandhi (1982)
- The Way (2010)
- The Dead Zone (1983)
- The Believers (1987)
- The Final Countdown (1980)
- Flatland (2007)
- Bobby (2006)
- Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
- The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)
- Trash (2014)
- Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
- Imagine That (2009)
- The Cassandra Crossing (1976)
- The Double (2011)
- Cadence (1990)
- Cadence (1990)
- Echelon Conspiracy (2009)
- Ask Me Anything (2014)
- Badlands (1974)
- 12 Mighty Orphans (2021)
TV (18)
- The West Wing (1999)
- Grace and Frankie (2015)
- Anger Management (2012)
- Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990)
- The Defenders (1961)
- The American Experiment (2026)
- Flipper (1964)
- Who Do You Think You Are? (2010)
- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006)
- America's Game: The Super Bowl Champions (2006)
- Toma (1973)
- The Nurses (1962)
- The Atlanta Child Murders (1985)
- aka Charlie Sheen (2025)
- Alex Haley's Queen (1993)
- Gun (1997)
- Blind Ambition (1979)
- Celebrity Poker Showdown (2003)
Where to start with Martin Sheen
Start with Badlands. Everything else grew out of it, and at ninety minutes it costs you almost nothing to find out whether this actor is for you. Then Apocalypse Now, which asks the opposite job of him: barely any dialogue, a man being taken apart on camera for two and a half hours. Pair it with Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, one of the rare documentaries that improves the film it is about.
For the television Sheen, The West Wing is the whole argument, and The American President rehearses the same decency under pressure in two hours if you want the compressed version. Save the villains for last, because he is better at them than his reputation admits: the smiling demagogue of The Dead Zone and the flat institutional menace of Judas and the Black Messiah. Skip Spawn unless you are curious what he looks like bored.
The seventies and eighties films
Badlands and Apocalypse Now within five years of each other, and the second nearly finished him, with a heart attack in the Philippines at thirty-six. Wall Street gives him a father opposite his own son.
The West Wing and television
Jed Bartlet ran for seven seasons and became the president a great many Americans wished they had, which he has said makes him uncomfortable. Grace and Frankie is the warm late comedy work.
The later films
The long supporting career since. The Departed gives him the only decent man in the film, The Way was directed by his son and is the personal one, and Judas and the Black Messiah is the recent nasty turn.