Barry Robert Pepper (born April 4, 1970) is a Canadian-American actor. His best-known film roles include Private Daniel Jackson in Saving Private Ryan (1998), Corrections Officer Dean Stanton in The Green Mile (1999), Roger Maris in 61* (2001), Joseph L. Galloway in We Were Soldiers (2002), Charlie Halliday in The Snow Walker (2003), Mike Norton in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), Sergeant Michael Strank in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Lucky Ned Pepper in True Grit (2010), DEA Agent Cooper in Snitch (2013), Vince in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) and Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018), and David Keller in Crawl (2019).
Among other accolades, Pepper has been nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Genie Award, an Independent Spirit Award, and a Golden Globe Award. For his role as Robert F. Kennedy in the miniseries The Kennedys (2011), Pepper won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.
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Early life and education
Pepper was born the youngest of three boys in Campbell River, British Columbia, the son of a lumberjack. When he was five years old, his family set sail in a homemade yacht, navigating through the South Pacific islands for five years. He was educated through correspondence courses and public schools in Polynesia. His family encouraged him to entertain himself through improvisation and acting games while aboard the ship. When the family had finished their travels, they returned to Canada, settling on Denman Island, which his mother's family had called home for five generations. He graduated from Georges P. Vanier Secondary School in 1988. Pepper attended Camosun College after receiving a scholarship for artistic achievement, studying marketing and design. He later moved to Vancouver, where he enrolled in acting classes and worked at White Spot, where he was known for wearing a cow print jacket with a fringe. He spent four years studying, including at the Gastown Actors Studio, before landing a recurring role on the show Madison.
