Trivia: Born in New York City on August 8th, 1968 and raised in Fairfield, CT, prolific film and television actor Michael Weatherly got his start on an episode of The Cosby Show before moving on to carve out an impressive career on screens both large and small. While many television viewers would recognize Weatherly from walk-on roles in such popular television series as Charmed and Ally McBeal, it was the actor's controversial age-disparity romance with Dark Angel co-star Jessica Alba that got tongues wagging around Tinseltown back in 2001. He could be seen opposite Alba on that sci-fi program throughout its two-season run (2000-2001). Later, Weatherly portrayed actor Robert Wagner in the made-for-television drama The Mystery of Natalie Wood before revealing a deeply personal secret about his onscreen girlfriend in Her Minor Thing. In 2003, Weatherly landed his most regular television role to date, as a Naval criminal investigator on NCIS.

Trivia: Born in the Windy City on January 17, 1975, the prolific Puerto Rican-American thespian Freddy Rodriguez cut his acting chops at Chicago's Lincoln Park High School, where he headlined a number of time-worn stage classics, including The Crucible, Twelve Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird. He married his high school sweetheart, Elsie, and slid effortlessly into a cinematic career soon after graduation, taking his first official onscreen bow at the age of 19, as the younger version of Billy Wirth's prison parolee Terry Griff in the sobering and gritty 1994 drama The Fence. That feature lacked wide distribution and slipped by many, but no matter, for two highly coveted spots in A-list features followed the next year. Rodriguez portrayed Anthony Quinn's son, Pedro Aragon, Jr., in Alfonso Arau's lush 1995 romantic melodrama A Walk in the Clouds, and Vietnam vet Jose in The Hughes Bros.' period piece Dead Presidents, the Menace II Society follow-up about a young African-American man who drifts casually into a crime-infested life in the late '60s.Countless spots in films of equal weight followed, including Can't Hardly Wait (1998), Payback (1999), and Chasing Papi (2001), but Rodriguez made his most enduring mark on the small screen, where he became a familiar face on a number of hit series. He appeared in three 1999 episodes of Party of Five, as Albert, the man who mugs Sarah and later rips her off, despite her vain attempts to befriend him. The spot was short-lived, but productive; the added exposure eventually led to Rodriguez's most prominent role. He entered the mind's eye of cable devotees everywhere by becoming a permanent fixture on the HBO/Alan Ball production Six Feet Under, a jet-black comic series about the Fisher family, proprietors of a Los Angeles mortuary. As Federico Diaz, a gentle, emotionally sensitive mortician-cum-partner, Rodriguez proved popular with audiences and helped to sustain the series throughout its five-year run. He followed this up with yet another minor role, on the Emmy-award winning NBC series Scrubs, as Nurse Carla Espinosa's (Judy Reyes) brother. The part entailed only fleeting, intermittent appearances, but left a memorable impression nonetheless.Rodriguez temporarily reemphasized his silver screen work beginning in 2006, with tertiary roles in several prominent features. These include Valentin in Poseidon (2006), Wolfgang Petersen's disappointing remake of the 1972 Irwin Allen disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure; Reggie, a character restricted to only using half of his body, in M. Night Shyamalan's seventh feature, Lady in the Water; and a fleeting role as Jose in Bobby, Emilio Estevez's docudrama on the assassination of presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968.In 2007, Rodriguez returned to television in a recurring role as sandwich vendor Giovanni "Gio" Rossi on the enormously popular Ugly Betty. He stayed on with the show into its third season in 2008, while also starring in and executive producing the holiday comedy Nothing Like the Holidays. Regular television work continued with a featured role on the short-lived CBS series Chaos and voice work on the animated sci-fi series Generator Rex.

Trivia: Was working for a French back, selling derivatives, when she was relocated to New York; she saw the play Appointment with a High-Wire Lady and decided to quit and become an actor. Got her Equity card for a one-night performance of Speed-the-Plow. Appeared in a series of AT&T commercials. Made her Broadway debut in Hand to God in 2015, earning a Tony nomination for her performance.

Trivia: Born in Germany and raised in Clarksville, TN. Starred as the character Mimi Marquez in international and Broadway stagings of Rent. Appeared as a dancer in Beyoncé's "Work It Out" music video. Hobbies include painting.

Trivia: Parents work as producers for television and her grandfather was an actor. First acted at the age of 5 as the lead in a local production of Annie and performed in more than 60 plays while growing up. Began studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute at the age of 16. Received five production grants from New York University, allowing her to write, direct and perform in six original short films and two plays during her time studying there. Won the Audience Award in Comedy at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth for her 2015 film Anchovies.

Trivia: Is a first-generation American, with her mother being from Haiti and her father from St. Vincent in the British West Indies. Began singing at church at the age of 5. In 1999, was nominated for a Paper Mill Playhouse Rising Star Award for her performance in her high school's production of Hello, Dolly! and subsequently attended Paper Mill's summer conservatory. Made her Broadway debut as Sabina Temple in the short-lived musical The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at Minskoff Theatre in 2001 while she was still pursuing her degree at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Performed the role of Dorothy in The Wiz at La Jolla Playhouse, earning her a 2006 Craig Noel Award for Theatrical Excellence. In 2008, starred in two leading roles at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Cleopatra in Caesar and Cleopatra, opposite Christopher Plummer. Originated the role of Nabulungi in the widely-acclaimed Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, a role for which she won the 2011 Tony Award for Featured Actress in a Musical. Played the role of Éponine in the 2014 Broadway revival of Les Misérables. Worked on a PSA for the United Negro College Fund with Spike Lee.

Trivia: The first Asian filmmaker to helm a major Hollywood feature, John Woo initially emerged as the leading light of the Hong Kong action renaissance of the late '80s. Celebrated for his unique, much-imitated style -- a Molotov cocktail of graceful slow-motion sequences, staccato edits, freeze-frames, and dissolves -- Woo brought a new depth of emotion and visual beauty to the action genre, perfecting an operatic, highly stylized brand of mayhem laced with melodrama, savage wit, and homoerotic undercurrents.Woo was born Wu Yu Sen on May 1, 1946, in the Guangzhou Canton Province of China, his parents relocating the family to Hong Kong three years later to escape life under communism. The Woos were quite poor, and were homeless for several years. His father, a philosopher, was later hospitalized with tuberculosis for over a decade. It was his mother who introduced Woo to the cinema, where he fell under the sway of American musicals and the films of the French New Wave, with Jean-Pierre Melville emerging as his greatest influence. After the death of his father, Woo was forced to leave school at the age of 16. He took a job at a newspaper called the Chinese Student Weekly, learning film theory by stealing books on motion pictures from area libraries and shops.Influenced by Western cinema, Woo grew increasingly dissatisfied with the Hong Kong production industry, and decided to begin making his own films in 1968. Over the next two years he made a number of shorts in 8 mm and 16 mm, most of which were later lost. By the close of the decade he was employed as a production assistant and script supervisor at Cathay film studios. By the early '70s, Woo had been elevated to the position of assistant director under the aegis of the prolific Shaw Brothers Studios. At the same time he drew great inspiration from the new breed of American filmmakers including Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick, the hypnotic violence of their work leaving a profound effect. At Shaw Brothers, Woo began working under martial arts director Chang Che, whose expressive, emotional brand of action filmmaking left an indelible mark on his protegé. After assisting Chang on several films, including Four Riders and Boxer From Shantung, Woo was finally tapped by the rival Golden Harvest Studios to direct his own feature, 1973's The Young Dragons. An innumerable string of low-budget efforts followed, ranging from chop-socky pictures like 1974's The Dragon Tamers and 1975's Hand of Death (Jackie Chan's first major star turn) to the 1975 Chinese opera Princess Chang Ping. In 1977, he directed The Pilferer's Progress, a comedy starring Ricky Hui. The tremendous success of the film established Woo as a comic filmmaker, and of the many features he subsequently helmed, including 1978's Last Hurrah for Chivalry, 1979's From Riches to Rags, and 1982's Plain Jane to the Rescue, the majority were comedies. By the mid-'80s, Woo's career had largely come to a halt. His later films, including a pair of efforts shot in Taiwan (1984's The Time You Need a Friend and 1985's Run Tiger Run), had all failed miserably at the box office. With the aid of producer Tsui Hark, Woo was able to mount his longtime pet project, A Better Tomorrow, a fusion of the themes of traditional martial arts tales with the kind of ambivalent protagonists and graphic violence found in Western action films. Released in 1986, the film was Woo's commercial and critical breakthrough, becoming Hong Kong's top box-office attraction of the year and launching stars Chow Yun Fat and Leslie Cheung into the upper echelon of Eastern film talent. A Better Tomorrow marked the true emergence of Woo's balletic action style, an aesthetic he continued to hone in films like 1987's A Better Tomorrow II and 1989's masterful The Killer, which became his American breakthrough when released in the U.S. a few years later. The Vietnam war drama Bullet in the Head followed in 1990, and after the success of 1992's Hard-Boiled, Hollywood came calling. With star Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead, Woo took the helm for 1993's Hard Target. An updating of The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target ultimately fell victim to overzealous editing after it was stamped with the dreaded "NC-17" rating by the MPAA. Additionally, the film was inexplicably deemed "too Chinese" by the studio and by the time the film reached stateside theaters it was an little more than an anemic ghost of prime Woo. In its original, uncensored form (which was the form it was released in overseas), the film stands alongside many of Woo's most entertaining Hong Kong efforts. In the years to come, Woo would remain active in the American film industry, but he never seemed to recapture the magic of his Hong Kong productions. While a few of his Hollywood projects scored comercial success despite critical scorn (like 1996's Broken Arrow), many of Woo's English language films were flat out disappointments for critics and audiences alike (like 1999's Mission: Impossible II), and still others would prove to be so bonkers and strange, they became cult favorits (like 1997's Face/Off). Interestingly, when Woo returned to his roots with period pieces about Chinese history like the Mandarin language war epic Red Cliff, he seemed to regain considerable credability, adding yet a new and fascinating phase to the legendary filmmaker's already storied career.