Patrick Fischler

Patrick Fischler is the American actor who portrays Isaac Heller on ABC's Once Upon a Time.

Biography

Fischler was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 29, 1969. His father Bill purchased a restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu when he was five years old, naming it "Patrick's Roadhouse" after him; it has since become a hot-spot for many celebrities. After graduating from high school, Fischler attended the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University, where he met and started dating his future wife, Lauren Bowles, who would become an actor. After graduating, Fischler and Bowles both moved back to Los Angeles, where they formed a theater group called Neurotic Young Urbanites along with other New York University graduates. A visiting agent saw Fischler perform at a Neurotic Young Urbanites production and became impressed, arranging for him to attend an audition for the 1994 action film Speed, which then became Fischler's debut in the feature-film industry. In the film, Fischler portrayed a man trapped inside an elevator alongside several others, which nearly falls due to an attack by a bomber.

In 1998, Fischler starred in the indie film The Week That Girl Died, a romantic comedy about three longtime friends in a small New England fishing town. Fischler also appeared in the 2001 psychological thriller Mulholland Drive, playing a man describing a horrible nightmare that he had. He also appeared in the 2002 made-for-TV film Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, a biopic about comedian Gilda Radner, where he starred as Eugene Levy. He also made appearances in the films Twister, Ghost World, Old School, The Great Buck Howard, and The Black Dahlia. In the latter film, his character was referred to as "Jewboy," which led to accusations of antisemitism within the film. Fischler also guest-starred in TV shows, including Angel, Nash Bridges, Burn Notice, Lie to Me, Bones, Cold Case, Monk, Star Trek: Enterprise, Girlfriends, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, and CSI: NY.

Fischler later auditioned for what would become one of his best-known roles: that of Jimmy Barrett on the AMC-produced drama series Mad Men, of which he was a fan. Alex Witchel, a writer from The New York Times Magazine, who sat in on Fischler's audition, lauded his performance, remarking that he was "breathtakingly good." The character of Jimmy Barrett is a client of the advertising company featured within the show, whose wife sleeps with protagonist Don Draper. Fischler was cast in the role because he had a "New York quality" that Jimmy Barrett was meant to have. Fischler stated that entertainer Joey Bishop was a major influence on how his portrayal because he wanted his character to have "a charming element to him and make people laugh even while he said horrible things," a characteristic shared with Bishop. Because of this role, Fischler received a great deal of exposure and an increase in name recognition after his role on Mad Men ended.

Starting in 2009, Fischler landed recurring roles on both the ABC-produced drama series Lost and the NBC-produced police-procedural drama series Southland. Because he was cast on Lost immediately while the pilot for Southland was being filmed, he had to work on both shows over the course of six months. In order to do so, he constantly flew back and forth between Hawaii, where Lost was filmed, and Los Angeles, where Southland was filmed, while simultaneously dealing with his wife's then-pregnancy. On Southland, he portrayed Detective Kenny No-Gun; while on Lost, he starred as Phil, a member of the Dharma Initiative that was active in the show's chronology of 1977, who was originally expected to appear in only two episodes, but ended up appearing in nine.

More recently, Fischler appeared in the 2010 comedy Dinner for Schmucks, starring as Vincenzo, one of the guests at a dinner where rich people bring eccentric guests and compete for who can bring the biggest loser. Fischler also provided the voice and movements of real-life gangster Mickey Cohen in the video game L.A. Noire, which was released in May 2011. The game uses a facial performance-capture technology called MotionScan to record the performances of actors, then convert them to the graphics of the game. The game's casting directors had previously worked on Mad Men and specifically approached Fischler to star as Mickey Cohen; he accepted due to his liking of the film noir genre. In January 2012, Fischler appeared in One for the Money, a crime-thriller film adapted from the 1994 novel of the same name written by Janet Evanovich, and the first in a series that features the character of Stephanie Plum, who is a bounty hunter. In the film, he portrayed Vinnie Plum, a bail bondsman and Plum's cousin. He then portrayed poet Lew Welch in the 2012 film Big Sur, which is based on the autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac.^[2]

Trivia

• His favorite episode is "Sympathy for the De Vil."^[3]

Appearances

Note: "Archive" denotes archive footage.

External links

• Patrick Fischler on Internet Movie Database
• Patrick Fischler on Wikipedia
• @pfischler (Patrick Fischler) on Instagram
• @PFischler (Patrick Fischler) on X, formerly Twitter

References