Adrian Kayvan Pasdar (born April 30, 1965) is an Iranian-American actor and film director, known for playing Jim Profit on the cult TV series Profit, for his roles in Near Dark, Mysterious Ways and as Nathan Petrelli on Heroes, and for directing the feature film Cement.
Pasdar was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His father, Homayoon Pasdar, was a cardiac surgeon who was born in Iran and moved to the United States, working as a surgeon near Philadelphia. His mother, Rosemarie Sbresny, was born in Königsberg, Germany, and worked as a nurse before becoming an English teacher in France.
Pasdar won a football scholarship to the University of Central Florida. However, he was badly injured in a car accident during his freshman year. The accident left his face scarred, his legs badly injured, and kept him in a wheelchair for several months. Pasdar finished his freshman year in a wheelchair, doing intensive physical therapy and turning his attention to campus stage productions and rediscovering a childhood interest in writing and acting. No longer able to play football, he dropped out of school and returned home, taking a job with a theater group, People's Light and Theatre Company. Here he worked on sound and lighting and also did set construction. One day, while constructing a set, he cut off the end of his left thumb. He used the resulting medical compensation to pay for attendance at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute in Los Angeles.
At the age of 19, he auditioned for a role in Top Gun. Director Tony Scott was so impressed that he wrote the part of "Chipper" just for him. This led to bigger roles in Solarbabies (1986), Streets of Gold (1986), and Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 cult vampire movie Near Dark (1987), with Pasdar in the lead role of Caleb Colton. Other major roles include Vital Signs (1990). In 1992, he left Hollywood and returned to New York, working as a cashier for room and board, while taking the occasional small part, such as Frankie in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993).
Adrian Pasdar wrote and directed the short film Beyond Belief and directed his first feature film, the art-house neo-noir Cement, a contemporary re-telling of Othello, in 1999. The $1.7 million independent feature, which won Best Picture awards on the festival circuit, starred Chris Penn, Jeffrey Wright, Sherilyn Fenn, Henry Czerny and was written by Farscape's screenwriter Justin Monjo.
"I've used every ounce of energy and every drop of money I had to make Cement," Pasdar said.
Pasdar's major break into television came in 1996, when he was cast as the title character on the short-lived Fox series Profit.
From 2000 to 2002, Pasdar played the lead role of Anthropology Professor Declan Dunn in the spooky cult drama series Mysterious Ways on PAX.
Pasdar played David McClaren in the final two seasons of the long-running CBS drama Judging Amy, from 2003 through 2005. In 2006, he had a high-profile guest role as Gabrielle Solis's sleazy lawyer in Desperate Housewives.
He currently stars in the NBC superhero drama Heroes as Nathan Petrelli. He bases his mysterious character on "the most morally liquid characters" that he's encountered in his life. The character is not based on one particular political figure, but on a conglomerate of different ones, both good and bad.
Anamarie "Pinky" Pasdar is the younger sister of Adrian Pasdar. She is also an actor and appeared in the Mysterious Ways episode Handshake.
Pasdar married lead singer Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in June 2000. The couple first met in May 1999, at the wedding of band member Emily Robison and singer-songwriter Charlie Robison. They were married in Las Vegas's Little White Wedding Chapel, in a $55 no-frills ceremony officiated by the chapel's "Pastor Ann." They have two children, Jackson Slade Pasdar (born March 15, 2001) and Beckett Finn Pasdar (born July 14, 2004) and live in Los Angeles and Austin, TX.
