Dominic Purcell

Dominic Haakon Myrtvedt Purcell was born on February 17, 1970 in England. Two years later, Dominic ad his family moved from England to Sydney’s Bondi and later moved to the Western Suburbs. His mother is Irish and his father is Norwegian. He attended Blaxland East Public School in his elementary school years and went to St. Dominic’s College, Penrith and McCarthy Catholic College for high school. He grew up in a blue-collar neighbourhood, loved surfing and worked as a landscape gardener as a teen, but soon tired of the profession. He was inspired to explore acting as a profession after watching Oliver Stone's Platoon . Due to his working class background, acting seemed a very unlikely choice of career so he decided to enrol in acting course. He studied at the Australian Theatre for Young People and then later enrolled at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts where he met his future wife Rebecca and studied alongside Hugh Jackman. Eventually, Dominic landed a role on the Australian TV Series Raw FM in 1997 and then a small stints in Mission:Impossible II and Equilibrium in 2002.
With his barrel chest and oversized frame, Purcell seemed almost tailor-made for a career as a character player. He remained in that sphere temporarily, but traveled a step beyond it in terms of complexity, playing not just one type time and again, but a broad array -- ranging from everyman heroes and monsters to occasional toughs. Consequently, Purcell shot rather quickly to top billing. After a scant few supporting turns, Purcell's first major starring role arrived with his lead portrayal in the series John_Doe (2002). The series lasted only a season but Purcell soon popped up on the big screen in Blade: Trinity and again on TV in a memorable stint on the short-lived prime-time soap North Shore before landing his career-making role as wrongly accused death-row inmate Lincoln Burrows on Prison Break in 2005 following his major cinematic role in the natural horror picture Primeval (2007).