Justin Chatwin

Justin Chatwin is a Canadian actor born on October 31, 1982, in Nanaimo, British Columbia. He built an early screen career in Canadian and American television before gaining wider attention in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 adaptation of The War of the Worlds. In that film, he played Robbie Ferrier, the teenage son of Tom Cruise’s dockworker Ray Ferrier. Robbie’s determination to join the military during the alien invasion is one of the film’s family-conflict threads. Chatwin later took the title role of Goku in Dragonball Evolution (2009), James Wong’s live-action film based on Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball manga and anime franchise. The story follows Goku as he seeks the Dragon Balls while confronting Piccolo, played by James Marsters. Chatwin also starred as Nick Powell in The Invisible (2007), a thriller directed by David S. Goyer. His character, attacked and left in a coma, experiences the world while unable to make contact with the living. On television, Chatwin is particularly associated with Shameless, Showtime’s American adaptation of the British series. He played Steve Wilton, who later uses the name Jimmy Lishman, Fiona Gallagher’s first major romantic partner. The character’s apparently affluent persona conceals car theft and a dangerous connection to criminal activity. Chatwin was a series regular during the show’s early seasons and returned in later episodes, making Steve/Jimmy an important continuing presence in Fiona’s storyline. In 2016, he played Cam Hawthorne in CBS’s American Gothic. Cam is a member of the influential Hawthorne family, whose political ambitions are disrupted by revelations surrounding a serial killer. That same year, Chatwin appeared in Doctor Who’s Christmas special, “The Return of Doctor Mysterio,” as Grant Gordon, a New York man with superhero-like abilities who becomes known as the Ghost. Chatwin’s later science-fiction work includes Orphan Black, where he played drug dealer Jason Kellerman in the third season. He was also cast as Erik Wallace in Netflix’s Another Life, a series centered on an alien artifact and the space mission led by Niko Breckinridge. Erik, Niko’s husband, remains on Earth while public panic and the artifact’s consequences unfold. In Zack Snyder’s 2011 film Sucker Punch, Chatwin played the High Roller, a patron within the brothel setting that frames Babydoll’s effort to escape. His television credits range from Gallagher family’s Chicago in Shameless to the cloned identities and corporate conspiracies of Orphan Black and the extraterrestrial crisis of Another Life during its initial run on Netflix.