Benny Safdie

Benny Safdie is a filmmaker and actor whose work has moved between independent cinema, major studio films, and television. With his older brother Josh Safdie, he directed *Daddy Longlegs* (2009), *Heaven Knows What* (2014), *Good Time* (2017), and *Uncut Gems* (2019). The brothers often collaborated with Ronald Bronstein, who co-wrote and edited several of their films.

*Daddy Longlegs* follows a New York father, played by Bronstein, caring for his two young sons during a brief period of custody. Its story drew on the Safdie brothers’ childhood experiences. For *Heaven Knows What*, they worked with Arielle Holmes, whose account of living with heroin addiction in New York became the basis for the film. Holmes also starred in it, playing a young woman caught between her addiction and a volatile relationship.

In *Good Time*, Benny Safdie took a leading role as Nick Nikas, whose arrest after a bank robbery sends his brother Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, on a desperate overnight attempt to free him. The film competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Two years later, the brothers directed *Uncut Gems*, with Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner, a Diamond District jeweler whose gambling debts and risky bets threaten his business and family. The film features basketball player Kevin Garnett as himself and gave Julia Fox her feature-film debut.

Safdie has also acted outside the films he directed. He played Los Angeles politician Joel Wachs in Paul Thomas Anderson’s *Licorice Pizza* (2021) and physicist Edward Teller in Christopher Nolan’s *Oppenheimer* (2023). In the 2023 adaptation *Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.*, he played Herb Simon, Margaret’s father. These roles placed him in stories far removed from the frantic New York settings most closely associated with the Safdie brothers’ films.

On television, Safdie co-created *The Curse* with Nathan Fielder. The 2023 series stars Fielder and Emma Stone as a married couple whose home-renovation show becomes entangled with questions about their marriage, their public image, and the New Mexico community where they work. Safdie plays Dougie Schecter, the show’s producer, whose decisions make him an unsettling presence in their lives.

Safdie’s directing work also includes *Lenny Cooke* (2013), a documentary made with Josh about a highly regarded high-school basketball prospect who never reached the NBA. Across that documentary, his performances, and the brothers’ fiction films, his credits show a sustained interest in people whose ambitions collide with circumstances they cannot control.