Dominic Purcell

A landscaper from Sydney who watched Platoon and decided to become an actor isn't the usual origin story. He trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts alongside Hugh Jackman, then moved to Los Angeles after Fox cut his Mission: Impossible II role to nearly nothing. A procedural called John Doe (2002) kept him on the Fox lot long enough to build a relationship with the network, and when Prison Break arrived in 2005, they sent him the pilot directly. Playing Lincoln Burrows, the wrongly convicted death row inmate waiting to be broken out by his brother, made him a global name. The part landed so hard nothing after it ever fully dislodged it.

Prison Break still defines him publicly, but he worked steadily after it. The DC television universe kept him employed for seven years as Mick Rory/Heat Wave across The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. What shifted his public profile more recently had nothing to do with acting: marrying Tish Cyrus in August 2023 made him tabloid material. She's Miley's mother, Noah Cyrus was notably absent from the wedding, and gossip outlets treated it as a story all its own. He's now reuniting with Wentworth Miller on Snatchback at Universal Television, executive producing this time. Twenty years out from Prison Break, the two of them can still get a show set up on that friendship alone.

His full name is Dominic Haakon Myrtvedt Purcell. Norwegian father, Irish mother, raised in Bondi. He was at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at the same time as Hugh Jackman, which seems implausible until you remember that WAAPA has an absurd alumni roster. During the Season 5 Prison Break shoot in Morocco in 2016, an iron bar fell on his head on set: 150 stitches for the head wound, a broken nose, more stitches on his elbow, and an airlift from Ouarzazate to Casablanca for emergency treatment. He went back to work.