Vincent D’Onofrio

Vincent D’Onofrio (born June 30, 1959, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) American film and television actor who is known for the depth and intensity of his performances and for his imposing physicality. In spite of his vast oeuvre playing offbeat characters in small critically acclaimed films, he is perhaps most widely recognized for his role as police detective Robert Goren in the TV series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–11).

Though D’Onofrio was born in Brooklyn, he spent his early childhood in Hawaii and Colorado. After his parents divorced, he lived with his mother near Miami, where he learned to do tricks from the owners of a magic shop, while he spent summers engaging in backstage work at community theatres with his father. After graduating from high school in 1977, he attended the University of Colorado and became involved in community theatre productions in Boulder. After less than two years, D’Onofrio left the university and moved to New York City to become an actor. There he studied acting at the Actors Studio and worked as a bouncer. He performed in several Off-Broadway plays and made his Broadway debut in 1984 in the drama Open Admissions.

D’Onofrio’s first film role was in the teen romp The First Turn-On!! (1983), and he played a teenage hoodlum in It Don’t Pay to Be an Honest Citizen (1985) before getting his first big break. He was cast in a significant role as the unfit Marine recruit dubbed Gomer Pyle in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket (1987). Critics singled out his performance as compelling and as a highlight of the film. D’Onofrio also had a small role in Adventures in Babysitting (1987) and a more substantial part in Mystic Pizza (1988).

D’Onofrio continued to have a prolific career as a character actor in movies and roles that ranged from minor to celebrated. He played a witness to Pres. John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) and an aspiring screenwriter in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992). In addition, from about 1989 to 1993 he was involved with the actor Greta Scacchi; their daughter, actor Leila George D’Onofrio, was born shortly before the relationship ended. D’Onofrio starred with Tracy Ullman and Lili Taylor in Household Saints (1993). His other roles included Orson Welles in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood (1994), a police officer in Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopic Strange Days (1995), a jilted husband in Feeling Minnesota (1996), and a writer for the pulp magazine Weird Tales in The Whole Wide World (1996). He had a particularly memorable turn as an alien-occupied yokel in the cult classic Men in Black (1997).

In 1997 D’Onofrio was nominated for an Emmy Award for one of his few performances in a television show, when he played a man trapped between a subway train and the platform in Homicide: Life on the Street. He then starred with Matthew McConaughey in Richard Linklater’s The Newton Boys (1998), about a family of bank robbers; convincingly portrayed a man who might have returned from the future, opposite Marisa Tomei, in Happy Accidents (2000); and embodied Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Movie (2000). In 2001 D’Onofrio began his 10-year run as the riveting central character, Detective Goren, in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Starring in a television series did not impede D’Onofrio’s prolific movie career. His roles during this period included a drug dealer in the black comedy The Salton Sea (2002), the father of the title character in Thumbsucker (2005), a Mississippi disc jockey (uncredited) in Cadillac Records (2008), and a criminal killed by a cop for the money he is holding in Brooklyn’s Finest (2009). In 2004 he wrote, directed, and starred in a short film, Five Minutes, Mr. Welles, an effort that, combined with his TV work, resulted in his being hospitalized for exhaustion.

After the end of his television series, D’Onofrio’s film and TV output increased, although most of those films attracted little attention. He played Sylvester Stallone’s partner in the prison break film Escape Plan (2013) and a son of a prominent man (Robert Duvall) accused of wrongdoing in The Judge (2014). He portrayed a misguided security guard in Jurassic World (2015), a coach in the biopic Pele: Birth of a Legend (2016), and Jack Horne in the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven. In addition, he played a supervillain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe streaming series Daredevil (2015–18) and had the same part in the limited series Hawkeye (2021). Also in 2021 he portrayed Jerry Falwell in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a film drama based on the 2000 documentary of the same name, and appeared in the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Unforgivable. D’Onofrio also plays the mob boss Vincent Gigante in the series Godfather of Harlem (2019–  ).

D’Onofrio has served from 2011 on the advisory board of the Woodstock Film Festival, has campaigned for a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines in firearms, and has supported the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. He married Dutch model and photographer Carin van der Donk in 1997, and the couple have two sons, born in 1999 and 2008.