Thomas F. Wilson

Thomas F. Wilson
Wilson at Helium Comedy Club in Portland, Oregon on July 16, 2011
Born	Thomas Francis Wilson Jr. (1959-04-15) April 15, 1959 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Other names	Tom Wilson
Occupation	Actor, voice-over artist, comedian, writer, musician, painter
Years active	1983–present
Spouse(s)	Caroline Thomas (m. 1985)
Children	4

Thomas Francis Wilson Jr. (born April 15, 1959) is an American actor, voice-over artist, comedian, writer, musician, painter and podcaster best known for playing Biff Tannen, Griff Tannen and Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen in the Back to the Future trilogy and Coach Ben Fredricks on NBC's Freaks and Geeks and for his voice-over work in movies, TV shows and video games.

Early life

Wilson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in nearby Wayne, Pennsylvania. While attending Radnor High School, he was involved in dramatic arts;^[1] was president of the debate team, where his partner was future New York Times columnist David Brooks and played tuba in the high school band and was drum major of his marching band. He studied international politics at Arizona State University.

Wilson attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. While in New York, he got his first "real" stage experience as a comedian.

Career

In the early 1980s, Wilson moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career. He shared an apartment with fellow aspiring comedians Andrew Dice Clay and Yakov Smirnoff, and later joked that he "taught them both about America."^[2]

Wilson had a small role in the second season of NBC's Knight Rider in an episode titled "A Knight In Shining Armor".

His breakthrough role was the bully Biff Tannen in the 1985 film Back to the Future. He returned in the sequels Back to the Future Part II and Part III to reprise not only his role as Biff, but also to play Biff's grandson Griff Tannen and great-grandfather Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen. In every Back to the Future film, he ends up in a pile of manure (in reality, a heap of decayed sphagnum and other plant matters) after trying to kill or hurt Michael J. Fox's character Marty McFly. He reprised his role as Biff and voiced various Tannen relatives in the animated series. Wilson did not reprise his role as Biff in the initial versions of Telltale's Back to the Future: The Game released in 2011, being replaced by Kid Beyond. When the game was ported to the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in 2015 in commemoration of the original film's 30th anniversary, Wilson returned to provide Biff's voice in these newer versions.

In 1992, he voiced gangster Tony Zucco in Batman: The Animated Series and police detective Matt Bluestone in the animated series Gargoyles. He later went to co-star with Mark Hamill in Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, a video game. It was the third chapter in the Wing Commander series, but the first to feature live action and was extremely popular at the time. The character played by Wilson was Major Todd "Maniac" Marshall, a fellow starfighter pilot of Hamill's character. Wilson also starred in the sequels Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (1995) and Wing Commander: Prophecy (1997) and contributed his voice to the animated series Wing Commander Academy (1996) in the same role. He also guest starred in an episode of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in 1997.

Wilson played McKinley High School's Coach Ben Fredricks in the 1999–2000 NBC comedy-drama Freaks and Geeks. Coach Fredricks dated Bill Haverchuck's mother. Wilson was briefly reunited with his Back to the Future co-star Christopher Lloyd in the 1994 film Camp Nowhere.

Wilson has done a bit of voice-over work for the Nickelodeon TV show SpongeBob SquarePants. He has voiced particular villainous characters that are physically strong and/or menacing, such as Flatz the Flounder in the second season episode The Bully, and The Strangler in SpongeBob Meets the Strangler, and the non-villainous character Reg the Club Bouncer in No Weenies Allowed.

He has hosted a podcast, Big Pop Fun, on the Nerdist Network starting in November 2011. The podcast features Tom sharing stories of his career, as well as informal chats with show business friends including Samm Levine, Blake Clark, Steve Oedekerk, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and more.

Personal life

Wilson is an Irish American.^[3]

Wilson is a painter.^[4] Many of his paintings focus on classic children's toys. In 2006, he was selected to join the California Featured Artist Series at Disneyland.^[5]

Wilson practices Catholicism, and released a Contemporary Christian album in 2000 called In the Name of the Father.^[6]

With the rise in popularity of the Back to the Future series, many people began to ask him questions about his experiences making the films. Wilson found the repetitive nature of the questions to be so amusing and annoying that he wrote a song about them titled "Biff's Question Song" which he features regularly in his stand-up routine.^[7]

Filmography

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Thomas F. Wilson

• Official website
• Thomas F. Wilson at AllMovie
• Thomas F. Wilson on IMDb
• Konbini - Interview (2016)