
Age: 67
male
Matthew Avery Modine (born March 22, 1959) is an American actor and filmmaker. He shared the Venice Film Festival's Volpi Cup for Best Actor as part of the ensemble cast of Robert Altman's film Streamers (1983). He went on to play lead roles in several high-profile films throughout the 1980s, including Birdy (1984), Vision Quest (1985), and Married to the Mob (1988). He gained further prominence for playing U.S. Marine James T. "Joker" Davis in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). Other notable films include Pacific Heights (1990), Short Cuts (1993), Cutthroat Island (1995), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Oppenheimer (2023). On television, he portrayed Dr. Don Francis in the HBO film And the Band Played On (1993), Sullivan Groff on Weeds (2007), Ivan Turing in Proof (2015), and Dr. Martin Brenner on Netflix's Stranger Things (2016–2022). Modine has been nominated twice for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television for his work in And the Band Played On and What the Deaf Man Heard and received a special Golden Globe for him and the rest of the ensemble in Short Cuts. He was also nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Special for And the Band Played On.

The film tells the 1993 Memorial Day story of a 13-year-old German American boy, Kyle Vogel, who finds his Grandpa Bud's World War II footlocker during a game of hide and seek. Kyle strikes a deal with his grandfather to tell the stories behind any three objects he picks out of the footlocker, and the film proceeds to flash back to Bud's combat experience with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II while also flashing forward to Kyle's future experiences with the 34th Infantry Division, also known as the "Red Bulls," in Iraq. The three objects that young Kyle picks: Walther P38, Fragmentation from "potato masher" - Stielhandgranate (German for "stick hand grenade"), and a picture of Bud with Sgt Jack O'Hara.

