Wes Bentley
Born: 4th September 1978
Where: Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
Bentley's breakthrough performance came as Ricky Fitts in the Oscar-winning American Beauty by British director Sam Mendes.
The son of United Methodist ministers, he has three brothers and attended Sylvan Hills High School, Sherwood, Arkansas.
It was there that he developed an interest in acting when he helped set up an improv group B(3) + C and regularly dominated local talent competitions.
He was encouraged by his mother to apply to New York's Juilliard drama school, where he spent a year studying acting and earning his first roles in plays.
Bentley made his big screen debut as an anguished guitarist in the 1998 German indie film Three Before Zero before snagging a tiny role as a rapist in the thriller Beloved.
The following year he landed critical plaudits for the role of the teenage drug dealer in American Beauty with Kevin Spacey.
He followed it up with British director Michael Winterbottom's The Claim, an epic love story set during the California Gold Rush.
In 2001, he starred alongside Casey Affleck in the horror-thriller Soul Survivors and went on to play Jack Durrance in director Shekhar Kapur's adaptation of The Four Feathers.
He starred alongside Gerard Butler in the sports drama The Game of Their Lives, the story of how the US soccer team beat England 1-0 in Brazil in 1950.
In 2007, he played one of a pair of slackers who run into deathly trouble with a drugs gang in Weirdsville and also starred alongside Nic Cage in the sci-fi caper Ghost Rider.
Recent work includes the role of a deranged parking attendant opposite Rachel Nichols in the horror-thriller P2.
