Justin Chatwin

Justin Chatwin is a Canadian actor born on October 31, 1982, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He first attracted television attention in the United States through guest work, including appearances on Smallville and the science-fiction series Taken, before moving into prominent film roles. His early feature credits include Josie and the Pussycats (2001) and the 2004 thriller Taking Lives.

Chatwin played Robbie Ferrier, the teenage son of Tom Cruise’s dockworker Ray, in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005). The adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel follows a family trying to survive an alien invasion; Robbie’s urge to join the fighting becomes a recurring source of conflict with his father. In 2007, Chatwin starred as Nick Powell in The Invisible, a supernatural drama in which a brutal assault leaves his character suspended between life and death while he tries to communicate with the living.

He took the title role of Goku in Dragonball Evolution (2009), a live-action film drawing on Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball manga and anime. As Goku, he searches for the Dragon Balls and confronts Piccolo, played by James Marsters. The film’s reception was notably poor, and Toriyama later publicly said he had viewed it as a different work, rather than as the Dragon Ball he created.

From 2011 to 2015, Chatwin had one of his best-known television parts as Jimmy Lishman, also called Steve, on Showtime’s Shameless. He enters the American remake as Fiona Gallagher’s charismatic boyfriend, initially presenting himself as Steve Wilton before his criminal connections and double life emerge. The character’s relationship with Fiona, played by Emmy Rossum, links him closely to the Gallaghers’ unstable Chicago household. Chatwin returned for later episodes after Jimmy’s apparent disappearance at the end of season three.

His later screen work includes the BBC America science-fiction thriller Orphan Black, in which he played drug dealer Jason Kellerman; the CBS mystery series American Gothic as journalist Cam Hawthorne; and Netflix’s Another Life as Erik Wallace, whose wife Niko leads the Salvare mission after an alien artifact lands on Earth. He also appeared in the 2016 Doctor Who Christmas special “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” as Grant Gordon, an ordinary man whose childhood encounter with the Doctor gives him extraordinary abilities.

In 2022, he joined the cast of Canadian series “The Lake,” playing Justin, a gay man who returns to Canada after years abroad to reconnect with the daughter he gave up for adoption.