Kevin David Sorbo (born September 24, 1958) is an American actor best known for the roles of Hercules in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Captain Dylan Hunt in Andromeda, and Kull in Kull the Conqueror.
Early life
Sorbo was born in Mound, Minnesota, where he attended Mound Westonka High School. He is the son of Ardis, a nurse, and Lynn Sorbo, a junior high school mathematics and biology teacher. His father is of Norwegian descent, while his mother has English, German and Scottish ancestry. He was raised in a Lutheran family. Sorbo attended Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he double majored in marketing and advertising. To help make tuition, he began to work as a model for print and television advertising in the 1980s.
Career
Sorbo started his acting career in 1986 making guest appearances in several television series such as 1st & Ten, Murder She Wrote and The Commish.
In 1994, he shot to fame when he played the role of Hercules in the television film Hercules and the Amazon Women. This was the first in a series of television films that served as pilots for the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which ran from 1995 to 1999. He also directed a few episodes of the series. At the same time, Sorbo also guest-starred as Hercules in episodes of the 1995â€"2001 spin-off series Xena: Warrior Princess and provided the voice of Hercules in the 1998 direct-to-video animated film Hercules and Xena - The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus.
Other voice-over work followed, with Sorbo providing the voices of Reiko and Quan Chi in the 1997 video game Mortal Kombat 4. In between the years playing Hercules, he played his first leading film role in Kull the Conqueror (1997).
After Hercules came to an end, Sorbo played the starring role of Captain Dylan Hunt in the science-fiction drama series Andromeda from 2000 to 2005. In 2006, he played a recurring role on the final season of The O.C. and guest-starred in the sitcom Two and a Half Men. In 2007, he starred in the direct-to-video film Walking Tall: The Payback, which was a sequel to the 2004 film Walking Tall. He reprised his role in the second sequel, Walking Tall: Lone Justice which released later that year. He also starred in the Lifetime Channel film Last Chance Café, the Hallmark Channel film Avenging Angel, co-starring his real life wife Sam Jenkins and guest starred as a bounty hunter in the season-two episode "Bounty Hunters!" of the series Psych. He appeared in the 2008 spoof film Meet the Spartans, which was a box office success despite being universally negatively reviewed by critics. He starred in the Albert Pyun directed science fiction vampire film Tales of the Ancient Empire.
In an outtake clip from the Hercules TV series posted in 2010, Sorbo, portraying an evil Doppelgänger of his regular character, says "Wait a minute. This isn't my world. Disappointed!" Due to the non-sequitur sound of the line, the scene was widely misinterpreted as Sorbo reading aloud the stage direction "disappointed". In 2013, Sorbo explained in an interview that "disappointed" did not appear in the script, but rather was him breaking character as an in-joke between him and the crew. He was referencing a scene from the film A Fish Called Wanda in which Otto (played by Kevin Kline) cracks a safe only to find it empty, and screams, "Disappointed!" at it in frustration.
He served as Executive Producer and star of the movie Abel's Field in 2012. In 2012, Sorbo appeared in an episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories to recount an experience he had while in Minnesota shortly after he graduated from college. He and his girlfriend claimed to have seen the ghost of the "Bride of White Rock Lake" â€" a woman who supposedly died on her wedding day, murdered by a former lover.
Sorbo voiced one of the main protagonists, Prometheus, in the Wii video game The Conduit. Sorbo returned to the role of Hercules in a more sinister portrayal, in the video game God of War III, which was released for the PlayStation 3 in March 2010.
In July 2013, Sorbo, along with his wife, Sam, provided voice over for characters in the video game Cloudberry Kingdom In 2014 Kevin Sorbo co-starred in God's Not Dead, a film with a very strong underlying pro-Christian narrative. In this film he portrays an atheist who requires his students to disown their religions on the first day of college.
Personal life
On January 5, 1998, Sorbo married actress Sam Jenkins, whom he met the previous year when she had a guest role on Hercules. They have three children: Braedon Cooper (born 2001), Shane Haaken (born 2004), and Octavia Flynn (born 2005). Sorbo is the spokesman and chair of A World Fit for Kids! (AWFFK!), a non-profit organization that trains teenagers to become mentors to younger children.
In late 1997 while on a publicity tour for Kull the Conqueror and between the fourth and fifth seasons of Hercules, the newly engaged Sorbo experienced an aneurysm in his shoulder which caused three strokes. As a result, he was weakened for the next several years, a condition kept secret from the public while he recovered. During the last two seasons of Hercules (the fifth and sixth, which aired in 1998 and 1999), Sorbo had a reduced filming schedule to accommodate his condition, and more guest stars were featured in the show in order to reduce Sorbo's duties. The strokes, thought to be triggered when chiropractic manipulation of his shoulder released multiple blood clots from the aneurysm, left Sorbo with a permanent 10 percent vision loss, weakness, impaired balance, and migraines. In his 2011 autobiography True Strength, Sorbo revealed the details of his injury and how his wife Sam helped him recover.
Sorbo is a Christian and considers himself politically independent. He has expressed interest in the libertarian philosophy of agorism.
Sorbo believes Hollywood has limited his career because of his Christian views.
Filmography
Actor
Guest star
Producer
Director
Video games
References
External links
- Official website
- Kevin Sorbo at the Internet Movie Database
