Holt McCallany currently stars in the Netflix series Mindhunter for director David Fincher. He plays Bill Tench, an FBI agent researching serial killers in the late 1970s.
Holt was born in New York City to theatrical parents. His mother was an American singer/actress, and his father was an Irish actor/producer. He began school in Dublin, but later moved to New Jersey before being sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Omaha, Nebraska. He had a troubled childhood and at the age of 14 ran away from home to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He ended up with a job in a screwdriver factory unloading trucks until his parents sent him back to Ireland to the boarding school his father had attended forty years earlier.
After high school, Holt went to France to continue his education, studying French at the Sorbonne and art at the Paris American Academy, and later theater at L’École Marcel Marceau and L’École Jacques Lecoq. He spent a summer studying Shakespeare at the University of Oxford, and went with a production of Twelfth Night to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, before moving to New York to begin his professional acting career.
His first job was an apprentice actor at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, in the same apprenticeship once served by Tom Hanks, among others. Subsequently, he was cast as an understudy in the Broadway production of Biloxi Blues before landing a series of supporting parts in films such as Alien 3, Casualties Of War, Creepshow 2, The Search for One- eye Jimmy, Jade and the miniseries The Rough Riders. After playing the legendary boxing trainer Teddy Atlas in the HBO telefilm Tyson, he became a supporter of the Atlas Foundation Charity, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping children and families with medical and financial hardships.
Holt has delivered memorable performances for iconic directors in films like Fight Club, Three Kings, Men of Honor, Below, The Losers, The Perfect Guy, Sully, Shot Caller, and many others.
For television he played a detective with psychological problems who commits suicide on CSI: Miami, a soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder on Criminal Minds, and starred in the FX series Lights Out as a boxer with pugilistic dementia.
His first French-language film will be released later this year, Le Dindon, an adaptation of the George Feydeau comedy.