Ben Foster

Perhaps his first big name role was in the film Hostage , a dramatic thriller starring Bruce Willis . Ben Foster was 25 years old at the time and played a sociopath who held two children hostage in a huge house that had just been turned into a bunker. With enormous power, Foster managed to communicate an enormous uneasiness to the viewer, since little by little the evolution of his character became more and more extreme, maddening and psychotic. That air of a guy with a complicated, violent inner world, on the verge of exploding with anger, has since been characteristic of many of his works in the cinema.

Benjamin A. Foster was born on October 29, 1980, in Boston (Massachusetts). He is the son of Gillian and Steven, who own a restaurant. His paternal grandparents are Russian immigrants, while his maternal grandparents come from the state of Maryland. Ben has a younger brother, Jon Foster , also an actor. The family moved very soon to live in Fairfield, Iowa, the city where Ben grew up and where he began to feel a taste for the world of acting. That’s where he was when at the age of 12 he wrote and directed a small play, with which he won second place in a contest. At age 14, he enrolled in the Interlochen Theater Arts Summer Program and soon after, he dropped out of high school to move to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of acting.

The move worked out well for him, because as soon as he arrived he managed to work on the Flash Forward series , where two friends narrate their adventures and misadventures in their institute. In the cinema, she made her debut in the film Pacto lethal (1996), a criminal thriller starring Hilary Swank . Later, arranging some brief appearances in telefilms or series without drive, she obtained a leading role in Liberty Hights (1999), adolescent love drama directed by Barry Levinson . Three years later, she changed roles and began her idyll with dark guys in School for Assassins , and after a small role in the unique Northfork(2003) gave life to one of the geeky neighbors who lent a hand to Frank Castle in the violent The Punisher (2004). The following year Hostage arrived and the public was already able to verify his talent when he had to bear much of the dramatic weight of the script.

After his incorporation in the third season of the caustic Two Meters Underground , requests to work in prestigious films multiplied and thus Alpha Dog , X-Men 3: The Final Decision , both from 2006, or The Train of 3:10 (2007), all of them successful films where Ben Foster played highly conflictive, violent and angry types. He then joined the fantastic horror in films such as 30 days of darkness (2007) or Pandórum(2009), a film that went unnoticed but that little by little has been approaching the cult film. At the beginning of the decade, he went on to join casts in commercially important productions, with roles that were always intense and had weight in the plot: The Mechanic (2011), alongside Jason Statham ; Contraband (2012), with Mark Wahlberg ; Killer Loves (2013), with Daniel Radcliffe .

Already established in the industry, he was choosing juicier and more varied roles. He ended 2013 with two notable movies. In the drama In a Lawless Place he was a tough but big-hearted sheriff, while he reprized with Wahlberg as one of the heroic soldiers in Lone Survivor , Peter Berg ‘s vibrant film that told a harsh true story from Afghanistan. In 2015 he got the absolute leading role in The Program , where he perfectly played the cyclist Lance Armstrong, fallen from grace after discovering his systematic fraud. Ben Foster showed his great versatility. And in 2016 they have arrived the action drama The decisive hour , with Chris Pine; the fantastic Warcraft and Inferno ; and the interesting Comanchería , a criminal story in which he is also accompanied by Pine.

And there’s no shortage of jobs for this actor who loves Radiohead, Miles Davis and Johnny Cash, and whose favorite actors are Gena Rowlands , Gary Oldman and Philip Seymour Hoffman . In the portfolio is the premiere of Hostiles , a dramatic western with Rosamund Pike .