Russell Harvard

Explore about the Famous TV Actor Russell Harvard, who was born in United States on April 16, 1981. Analyze Russell Harvard’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Russell Harvard dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Russell Harvard?

Russell Harvard Biography

Film, TV, and stage actor who starred in the first season of FX’s critically acclaimed series Fargo as Mr. Wrench. He returned to the show in season 3 for a recurring part. He made his feature film debut in 2007’s There Will Be Blood as the adult version of H.W. Plainview and later portrayed mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill in 2010’s The Hammer.

He graduated from the Texas School for the Deaf in 1999, then attended Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C.

In 2012, he won the Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance in the Off-Broadway production of Tribes.

He was born into a third-generation deaf family as the younger of 2 sons of Kay and Henry Harvard. His brother’s name is Renny.

He was featured opposite fellow deaf actor Marlee Matlin in an episode of CSI: NY.

Born in Pasadena, Texas, into a third-generation deaf family, Harvard is the younger of two deaf sons of Kay (Youngblood) and Henry Harvard. Both his parents and his paternal grandmother are also deaf. In the early 1980s, the Harvards moved to Austin, Texas so that their elder son Renny could enroll at their alma mater, Texas School for the Deaf (TSD). The family initially placed Russell (due to his speech capability and residual hearing) in an oral college for children who learn to lip read exclusively. Finding he was unhappy there, his parents switched him to a deaf school education at TSD, which included training in lip reading and speech therapy in English. Although he is able to hear some sound with the use of a hearing aid, including speech and music, he identifies himself Deaf and considers American Sign Language to be his first language.

Russell Wayne Harvard (born April 16, 1981) is an American actor. He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted grown son, H.W. Plainview. In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill. Harvard also won acclaim Off Broadway in 2012 as Billy, the deaf son in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, hearing British family, in Tribes by Nina Raine. For his interpretation, he won a 2012 Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance and nominations for Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor. He played Mr. Wrench in the first and third season of the television series Fargo.

After graduating from TSD in 1999, Harvard began his studies at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. At various times during his college education he took a hiatus to work as a teacher’s assistant for preschoolers at the Alaska State School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Anchorage, Alaska. (His mother later joined him, working for the American Red Cross.) While there he contemplated a career as a teacher of theater, and in 2008 he returned as Artist in Residence. At Gallaudet he maintained a high GPA and completed his bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts, graduating in 2008.

Harvard cites his seeing, at age eight, his cousin perform on stage in The Wizard of Oz as the inspiration for his becoming an actor. Subsequently, he became very involved in theater at TSD. At Gallaudet he appeared in a 2006 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire and as Claudio in their co-production with Amaryllis Theatre of Much Ado About Nothing. His earliest professional stage work was in the twin roles of the Orderly and the Groundskeeper’s Son in the world premiere of Rachel Sheinkin and GrooveLily’s Sleeping Beauty Wakes for Deaf West Theatre (Center Theatre Group, 2007). With this dual performance, wrote TimeOut critic James Sims, “Harvard joins the rank of deaf actors transcending any perceived limitations due to a lack of speaking lines, capturing the heart of the newly created characters with ease.” The following year, he played (also for Deaf West) Aesop in Aesop Who? In 2007, he assistant directed the young-audience musical Nobody’s Perfect (Kennedy Center and VSA Arts).

On May 26, 2010, Harvard testified as a panel witness before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet in a hearing entitled “Innovation and Inclusion: The Americans with Disabilities Act at 20”, which focused on the issues raised by the Equal Access to Communications in the 21st Century Act. Speaking on behalf of the National Association of the Deaf and the Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT), he argued the need for Congress to pass new legislation to require closed captioning on video programming on the Internet just as it had done for television broadcasting in 1990:

Shortly after completing his scenes for There Will Be Blood, Harvard made his first network television appearance in the “Silent Night” episode of CBS’ CSI: NY, opposite Marlee Matlin, and later guest-starred in “The Box” episode (2010) of the Fox series Fringe. Other TV appearances include Switched at Birth and Odd Mom Out. He has acted in the short films Signage (2007), Words (2010) and This Is Normal (2013), played the principal role of Tim in the independent feature Claustrophobia (2011), and had leading roles in the ASL Films Versa Effect and Gerald. Harvard is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the Actors’ Equity Association.

In August 2013, the FX/MGM production team of Fargo, the anthology TV miniseries adaptation of the 1996 Coen brothers’ film, cast Harvard as Mr. Wrench, one of two hitmen who pursue Billy Bob Thornton’s lead character Lorne Malvo throughout the series. Writer-creator Noah Hawley, a part-time Austin resident who lives near Texas School for the Deaf, cited his own neighborhood encounters with sign language as the inspiration for the “Mr. Wrench” character: a deaf assassin who uses his command of ASL as a means of menace toward his targets and of private communication with his partner Mr. Numbers (played by Adam Goldberg). During the five-month shoot in Calgary, Alberta, Harvard and the show’s ASL manager, Catherine MacKinnon, worked closely with Goldberg on translating the pair’s dialogue into the most effective ASL exchanges for their scenes.

Critical response to Harvard and Goldberg’s seriocomic turn as bickering hired killers was overwhelmingly positive. Reviewers noted that they “steal scenes as Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench” (Time), make up one of the “satisfying subplots” (Huffington Post) and “have their own original energy” (Vulture.com). For Alan Sepinwall of HitFix.com, “the relationship between Goldberg . . . and Harvard feels unlike any criminal twosome of its type I’ve seen before, even in the midst of a show that is otherwise cleverly rearranging familiar pieces of the movie and other crime stories.” And Tim Goodman, TV critic for The Hollywood Reporter, wrote, “Encapsulating everything that is joyously weird about Fargo, the killers are the dangerous—and deaf—Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard) and his partner and translator, Mr. Numbers (Adam Goldberg) . . . Already I want a separate series that just follows around Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers.” Series creator Hawley, moreover, who has described Harvard as “magnetic and charismatic” in the role of Mr. Wrench, ended up extending the character’s appearance in the series. On June 19, 2014, the Broadcast Television Journalists Association honored Fargo with three awards (including Best Mini-series) at the Critics’ Choice Television Awards ceremony. Fargo also won three Emmys—most prominently “Outstanding Miniseries”—at the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on August 25, 2014; “Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television” at the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11, 2015; and, for “majestically reinventing a beloved tale and for expanding and richly rendering a darkly comic world of crime, revenge, and comeuppance”, was honored with a 2014 Peabody Award, whose citation recognized Fargo as having set “a new standard for what is possible in the process of adaptation.”

On August 10, 2015, Playbill.com officially announced the casting of Harvard for the Broadway company of Deaf West’s revival production of the Duncan Sheik-Steven Sater musical Spring Awakening. This transfer production, which opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on September 27, 2015, marked the Broadway debuts of both Harvard and his co-star Marlee Matlin.

Harvard recreated the role in the NY production’s transfer to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in spring 2013, and later that summer at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. On June 15, 2015, L.A. Theatre Works released an audio CD of Tribes, featuring Harvard and other original-cast members.

On Feb. 28th, 2019, Harvard opened at the Cort Theatre on Broadway as the Duke of Cornwall in Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, with Glenda Jackson in the title role. His presence in the role involved an interpreter for the deaf as an onstage character, signing to him and speaking most of his lines to the others when he signed back. He used his vocal skills to speak a few of his character’s lines in moments of high emotion; in his death scene, the interpreter emerged as the servant who opposes and fatally wounds him, and their confrontation was done entirely in sign language.

As of January 2020, Harvard is performing in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway in the roles of Link Deas and Boo Radley.

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