Trivia: The quiet yet dynamic screen presence of actor Joe Mantegna has made him one of the most powerful supporting actors in Hollywood. Born in Chicago, Mantegna made his acting debut in the 1969 production of Hair. He then joined Chicago's Organic Theatre Company. In 1978, he debuted on Broadway in Working; he also helped write Bleacher Bums, an award-winning play. Still, he did not become well-known until he played a recurring role on the TV show Soap. By 1983 he'd returned to Chicago, where he began working with playwright David Mamet. While playing the lead in Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), Mantegna won a Tony. When Mamet began making films, Mantegna became his actor of choice in works such as House of Games (1987) and Homicide (1991). Prior to that, the actor had played small roles in a number of other films. He also continues to play in a variety of movie genres, working with some of Hollywood's top directors. Mantegna turned producer in 1998 with the crime comedy Jerry and Tom. That trend continued on the small screen as Montenga produced such shows as Midway USA's Gun Stories, Shooting Gallery, and QuickBites, but it was his role as a regular on the CBS series Joan of Arcadia that really kept him in the public eye. Continually returning to his recurring role as Fat Tony on The Simpsons over the next decade, Montegna joined the cast of the hit television series Criminal Minds in 2007, and recieved an Emmy nomination for his performance in the successful mini-series The Starter Wife that same year.

Trivia: Versatile as well as tall, dark, and handsome, Thomas Gibson has moved easily between TV stardom and a varied movie career working with some of the industry's major names. Born and raised in Charleston, Gibson found his calling as a child, making his acting debut at age ten in children's theater productions. Though he attended the College of Charleston, Gibson relocated when he won a scholarship to New York's prestigious Juilliard School. After earning his B.F.A., Gibson made his professional New York theater debut in 1985. Gibson spent the rest of the 1980s doing theater, as well as branching out into television with two seasons on the daytime drama Another World and the TV movie Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1988).Gibson made the transition to films in style with a co-starring role opposite Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Ron Howard's glossy Irish-American epic Far and Away (1992). Along with playing a bit part in Martin Scorsese's lush The Age of Innocence (1993), Gibson further distinguished himself that year with larger roles in the critically praised PBS miniseries Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City and French-Canadian director Denys Arcand's first English-language film, the contemporary drama Love and Human Remains (1993).Gibson subsequently appeared in the second part of Whit Stillman's preppy trilogy, Barcelona (1994), and in the indie Sleep With Me (1994), but he became better-known to TV audiences that year on the CBS hospital drama Chicago Hope. After three seasons on the show, Gibson became an even more prominent TV presence in 1997 when he was cast as the straight-laced husband Greg to Jenna Elfman's hippie Dharma on the ABC sitcom Dharma and Greg. In addition to the memorable role of Greg, Gibson would appear in a number of feature films, like Eyes Wide Shut, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, and Psycho Beach Party, as well as subsuquent TV series, like the the proceedural Criminal Minds.

Trivia: California-born Shemar Moore parlayed a successful modeling stint into an acting career that began in 1994 with a lead role on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. Moore played Malcolm Winters for eight years, and earned a Daytime Emmy for his performance in 2000. After leaving The Young and the Restless, Moore landed a role on the short-lived WB superhero series Birds of Prey. A prominent supporting role in the surprise hit Diary of a Mad Black Woman followed in 2005, and that same year, he was cast on the CBS drama Criminal Minds alongside Mandy Patinkin and Thomas Gibson. In 2007, Moore made headlines in the gossip rags for a DUI arrest. He would go on to star on the proceedural Criminal Minds.

Trivia: Las Vegas native Matthew Gray Gubler got his show-business start as a fashion model, working for designers like Tommy Hilfiger. After graduating from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts in 2002, Gubler appeared in his first feature film, playing one of the interns in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004. He soon followed that performance with a starring role in the series Criminal Minds, playing the young genius Dr. Spencer Reid. He also made a small appearance in the comedy RV before signing on to appear in The Great Buck Howard. He had a major supporting role in (500) Days of Summer, but has probably had his largest success voicing the part of Simon, the nerdy member of the rodent trio at the heart of three Alvin and the Chipmunks movies.

Trivia: Canadian-born A.J. Cook trained as a competitive dancer before beginning her acting career at age 17 in the children's TV series Goosebumps. She started out in small roles on made-for-TV dramas until her first big break as one of the blonde Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides. She went on to a recurring role on Higher Ground, a Fox Family Channel series about teens in boot camp, where she played the love interest of fellow Canadian Hayden Christensen prior to his role of Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones. After another TV movie and the snowboarding comedy Out Cold, Cook found her niche as a lead actress in horror movies with Ripper: Letter From Hell in 2001. She then headlined a number of other thrillers, including Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, The House Next Door, and Final Destination 2. In 2005, she began her run in the series Criminal Minds, playing special agent Jennifer "JJ" Jareau. Cook took on a supporting role in the romantic comedy I'm Reed Fish in 2006, and starred in director Ron Satlof's comedy Misconceptions in 2008. The actress took another lead role in 2011 for Bringing Ashley Home, a docudrama following a woman (Cook) determined to find her sister when she suddenly goes missing. Cook returned to the horror genre in 2013, with Wer. A member of the Mormon church, Cook lives in Salt Lake City, UT, with her husband, Nathan Andersen.

Trivia: Like a lot of showbiz hopefuls, Kirsten Vangsness has had her share of day jobs. After paying the bills as a substitute teacher, child counselor, and dinner-theater actress, Vangsness found her big break when she was cast in a Pepsi commercial. Soon afterward, she scored the role of Penelope Garcia on the hit show Criminal Minds in 2004. She made her feature film debut in the thriller In My Sleep.

Trivia: Actress Paget Brewster got her first big break with a recurring role on Friends in 1997 playing Chandler's girlfriend Kathy. A regular stint on the most popular show on television was just the springboard that the actress needed to build up her resumé, and soon she was cast in the cult hit Andy Richter Controls the Universe and the Showtime series Huff. In 2006, she had a prominent role in the family comedy Unaccompanied Minors, and later that same year, she joined the cast of the series Criminal Minds. She has also, most notably, provided the voice of Birdgirl for the Adult Swim series Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Trivia: An actor whose name became synonymous with "comic relief" during the late 1990s, Jamie Kennedy made his reputation playing a series of wise-asses in such films as the Scream trilogy and the independent comedy Clockwatchers. Born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, on May 25, 1970, Kennedy showed comedic inclinations from an early age, and first became inspired to pursue an acting career when he was cast as an extra in Dead Poets Society (1989). After high school, Kennedy moved to L.A., where he wanted to have a career as an extra. Unfortunately, Hollywood casting agents had other ideas, and the aspiring actor found himself working odd jobs ranging from a restaurant busboy to a gum-scraper at K-Mart. During this time, he also studied at the American/British Drama Academy and began finding stand-up work at various improv clubs. It was in one of these clubs that he caught the attention of an independent filmmaker and was subsequently cast in the little-seen The Legend of Flin Flon. The actor's bona fide entry into the film industry came with a supporting role in Baz Luhrmann's 1996 William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, in which he played a fuchsia-haired thug. That same year he had a huge breakthrough in Wes Craven's Scream, which cast him as a video store clerk with an unnerving lust for horror movies. The great success of the film opened a number of doors for Kennedy, one of which led to a memorable role as an office boy in Jill Sprecher's well-received independent comedy Clockwatchers (1997), which also starred Lisa Kudrow, Parker Posey, and Toni Collette. The actor also reprised his role for the inevitable Scream 2 (1997) and Scream 3 (2000) and appeared in such slacker extravaganzas as Bongwater and Starf*cker (both 1998).Kennedy got a shot at more grown-up fare with a supporting role in David O. Russell's acclaimed Gulf War drama Three Kings (1999), and a turn as a movie studio gofer in the satirical Bowfinger (1999). His growing popularity was reflected in the number of projects he was involved with in 2000; included amongst them were Ben Younger's The Boiler Room, in which Kennedy played an ambitious young stock broker, and The Specials, an ensemble comedy that cast him as a member of a motley group of superheroes.He appeared in the movies Max Keeble's Big Move and Bug before moving to the small screen to host the series The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. He was the star of the ill-fated sequel Son of the Mask and he was one of the voiceover artists in the comedy Farce of the Penguins. His other projects include Malibu's Most Wanted, Finding Bliss, and Tyler Perry's Good Deeds.

Trivia: Earned a football scholarship to Duke University after a successful high-school career as a linebacker. Made his first television appearance as a lifeguard on an episode of Married...With Children. After a two-year stint as Chris Hughes on As the World Turns, he went on to star as another Hughes—Steve Hughes—on MyNetwork TV's Watch Over Me. Frequently rides horses as a Wyoming sheriff's deputy in the A&E series Longmire; he learned how to ride as a child on a farm in Illinois where his father had horses. Is an avid Chicago Cubs fan.

Trivia: An everyman character actor with a slightly authoritarian bent, Nick Searcy spent his first two decades onscreen specializing in portrayals of such easily recognizable types as policemen, FBI agents, private detectives, and military colonels. Searcy took one of his first bows as a highway patrol officer in the Tom Cruise-headlined Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer outing Days of Thunder (1990), then followed this up with roles in such projects as the telemovies Nightmare in Columbia County and White Lie (both 1991) and the Barbra Streisand feature drama The Prince of Tides (1991). Moviegoers may also associate Searcy with another portrayal from that same year, albeit a far nastier one: that of Frank Bennett, the slug of a husband who ends up as human barbecue at the Whistle Stop Café in Jon Avnet's sleeper hit Fried Green Tomatoes.As the following two decades unfurled, Searcy maintained an almost constant onscreen presence in dozens of films (albeit frequently low-profiled ones). Some of his more memorable projects included Michael Apted's Nell (1994) opposite Jodie Foster, Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away (2000) opposite Tom Hanks, and The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2004) opposite Sean Penn. In 2008, Searcy signed on as a regular -- portraying Roy Buffkin -- in the CW network's series drama Easy Money. That series was short-lived, but Searcy kept going with roles in The Ugly Truth and Blood Done Sign My Name. He was part of the cast for Justified, the hit cable series based on the work of Elmore Leonard, and in 2011 he played Matt Keough in the Brad Pitt sports drama Moneyball.

Trivia: Trained at Juilliard, actor Michael Beach worked in regional theater and off-Broadway productions before moving to Los Angeles to work on television and film. His stage credits include Much Ado About Nothing and Ascension Day. Though he appeared on television a lot in the late '80s, his film breakthrough came in Carl Franklin's 1991 crime thriller One False Move. He played the ex-con Pluto opposite Billy Bob Thornton, who also co-wrote the script. Thornton later wrote the role of Virgil for Beach in the 1996 drama A Family Thing, starring James Earl Jones. In 1993, he was a part of the ensemble cast in Robert Altman's award-winning feature Short Cuts. After playing opposite Laurence Fishburne in the crime thriller Bad Company (1995), Beach went on to play several unfaithful husbands. He cheated on Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale (1995), Vanessa Williams in Soul Food (1997), and Gloria Reuben on ER. Fellow ER cast member Eriq La Salle cast Beach in his sports drama Rebound: The Legend of Earl 'The Goat' Manigault (1996) for HBO. Back on television, Beach earned an Image Award for his role of Monte 'Doc' Parker on the NBC dramatic series Third Watch. In 2002, he re-teamed with actor/director La Salle for the lead role of Dr. Ty Adams in the thriller Crazy as Hell.

Trivia: Latino actor and heartthrob Adam Rodriguez found a convenient backdoor to Hollywood success. Proving definitively the old adage that "it's all in who you know," Rodriguez's dad, the longtime COO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, happened to be watching the Emmys in 1996 and recognized an old army buddy accepting a production award. The gentleman in question had graduated from policeman to NYPD Blue consultant to one of the program's producers. The elder Rodriguez impulsively phoned his pal to congratulate him on the award; this led to a renewed friendship, and in time, a small guest spot for Adam on NYPD Blue. At that point, Rodriguez had only just decided on his true calling in life. A stint of seemingly random occupations (including stockbroker and bellhop) followed by a brief theatrical tenure at the Jersey Peppermill Playhouse convinced the young man that his passion lay in acting. The Emmy incident, as it were, happened almost immediately afterward.A recurring role on the brief series drama Brooklyn South ensued, followed by a guest spot on Law & Order, then a bit part in the Gary Fleder movie Impostor. Rodriguez attained his first substantial recognition, however, as Jesse Ramirez, an erudite attorney unknowingly saddled with an extraterrestrial girlfriend, on the sci-fi series Roswell. But his greatest exposure was still yet to come. Beginning in 2002, he played Eric Delko, drug and fingerprint expert at the Miami-Dade crime laboratory, on CSI: Miami, the first successful spin-off to the crime series phenomenon CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Shortly thereafter, Rodriguez also signed for a part in Jessica Kavana Dornbusch's indie coming-of-age drama Thanks to Gravity (2005), about the trials and travails of a young woman of Jewish-Hispanic ancestry enrolled at Harvard. Numerous film roles followed, and on the heels of an appearance in Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself Rodriguez turned up in Ugly Betty as Hilda's on again-off again flame Bobby Talercio. In 2012 the chisled actor could be seen opposite Channing Tatum in Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike.

Trivia: Born September 18th, 1970, actress, comedian, author, reality-show host, and occasional scriptwriter Aisha Tyler came of age in San Francisco and studied poly sci at Dartmouth College before mounting a (brief) career as an advertising executive in her hometown. Dissatisfied by this pursuit, and pining to launch herself as a full-time entertainer, Tyler "dropped out" of the corporate world and hit the road with a solo standup comedy act in the mid-'90s.Around 2001 -- after five years in Los Angeles with occasional standup bookings and concomitantly limited acclaim and recognition -- Tyler landed two huge breaks, first as the host of the irreverent Talk Soup during that program's final year (a position she inherited from Greg Kinnear, John Henson, and others), and then as the primary host of the dating series The 5th Wheel. Riding the crest of popularity generated by reality television during the first several years of the millennium, Wheel coupled the unscripted spontaneity of The Real World and Survivor with the format of the dating series Blind Date. Its premise involved setting two couples up on blind dates, having them "swap" partners, and adding an unforeseen fifth member (the "wheel" of the title) to stir things up and add provocation. The program placed a greater emphasis on erotic and suggestive content than Blind and -- perhaps as a result -- it unsurprisingly became a massive, runaway hit.The ever-ambitious Tyler, however, continued to expand her horizons. She maintained a short tenure with Wheel and quickly moved on to other endeavors, placing a particularly strong emphasis on television work. This included a stint as Charlie (the only recurring African-American cast member) in the final two seasons of the popular sitcom Friends, and a recurring role as covert terrorist Marianne Taylor on the weekly suspenser 24. Tyler also portrayed attorney Andrea Moreno (who dies in a car crash but is then "ushered" over to the other side by Jennifer Love Hewitt's psychic) in the first season (2005-2006) of the supernatural drama The Ghost Whisperer. After that, Tyler segued into feature-film work, with bit roles in such pictures as The Santa Clause 3 and .45.Six feet tall and one of the most physically breathtaking young actresses of her generation, Tyler frequently provides beauty tips in such magazines as Ebony and Glamour; she is also an outspoken proponent of physical fitness and a strenuous exerciser who pushes herself to an almost unimaginable degree. A February 2007 issue of In Style magazine reported, "In addition to scaling walls, Tyler runs, uses a rowing machine, lifts weights, snowboards and scuba dives. But for her, nothing beats the mental rush of rock climbing." In 2004, Tyler also authored and published the best-seller Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl, a free-form, witty expostulation on such "hot" topics as men, bikini waxing, reality television, dating wars, sex, and body image.After filming several unremarkable movies throughout the mid-2000s, the actress found success on Archer, a television series that features Tyler as a dedicated but deadly agent for ISIS, a secret intelligence unit in New York City. While she continued work on Archer, she landed the job of co-host on The Talk, and later, host of the revamped Whose Line Is It Anyway? As if that weren't enough, Tyler also landed a recurring role on Criminal Minds in 2015.

Trivia: Studied conducting under David Zinman and Murry Sidlin at Aspen Music Festival and under Leonard Slatkin at the National Conducting Institute in Washington, D.C. Appointed an American Conducting Fellow of the Houston Symphony in 2004, and an assistant conductor of Kansas City Symphony in 2006. Has been a guest conductor at many orchestras, including Cleveland Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Monte Carlo Philharmonic, and NHK Orchestra of Tokyo. Made his Broadway acting debut in the play Clybourne Park in 2012.

Trivia: Launching her performing career in her native Tulsa, Jeanne Tripplehorn spent several years as a local radio DJ and TV host. Educated at both the University of Oklahoma and Juilliard, Born June 10th, 1963, Tripplehorn was first seen on a nationwide basis in 1991 in a supporting role in the made-for-TV movie The Perfect Tribute, a fictionalized retelling of the events leading up to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Many of Tripplehorn's film characterizations have ranged from mildly eccentric to deeply disturbed, thanks in great part to her breakthrough appearance as Michael Douglas' "rough sex" partner in the erotic chiller Basic Instinct (1992). She got a chance to play normal -- albeit frazzled -- as Hugh Grant's fiancée in the romantic comedy Mickey Blue Eyes (1999); in 2000, she returned to rougher territory as a lesbian gangster in Mike Figgis' experimental ensemble film Timecode. In 2006 Tripplehorn found success on the small screen for her role as Barb Henrickson, a devout Mormon who often struggles with her polygamous lifestyle, in the HBO drama series Big Love.