From: Favorite Hunks & Other Things
Friday Night Lights hottie Taylor Kitsch turns 33 today.
Taylor Kitsch (born April 8, 1981) is a Canadian actor and model. He is known for his role as Tim Riggins in the NBC television series Friday Night Lights (2006–2011), Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) the eponymous character in John Carter (2012), Lieutenant Alex Hopper in Battleship (2012), Chon in Savages (2012), Dr. Lewis in The Grand Seduction (2013) and Michael Murphy in Lone Survivor (2013).
Kitsch was born in Kelowna, British Columbia. His mother worked for the BC liquor board and his father in construction. He has two older brothers and two younger maternal half sisters, and was raised by his single mother in Vancouver. He played junior ice hockey for the Langley Hornets in the British Columbia Hockey League, before a knee injury ended his career.
Kitsch moved to New York in 2002 after receiving an opportunity to pursue modeling with IMG and studied acting there as well, there he became a nutritionist and a personal trainer. For a time in New York he was homeless and took to sleeping on subway trains in the middle of the night. In 2004, he relocated to Los Angeles where he modeled for Diesel and Abercrombie & Fitch. He also appears in the limited edition coffee table book About Face by celebrity photographer John Russo.
In 2006, Kitsch was cast in his breakout role on the NBC sports teen drama television series Friday Night Lights based on Peter Berg's 2004 film of the same name and is set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas. Kitsch portrayed for five seasons the role of Tim Riggins, a high school student who is the fullback/running back of the Dillon Panthers, It premiered in October 2006 to universal critical acclaim from critics and over 7.7 million viewers. He has ruled out reprising his role in a potential film sequel to the television series.
He played Pogue Parry in The Covenant alongside Steven Strait, Sebastian Stan, Laura Ramsey, Toby Hemingway, Jessica Lucas and Chace Crawford. In February 2008, he signed on to play Gambit in the X-Men franchise spinoff X-Men Origins: Wolverine, released in May 2009. Of the fan-favorite character of Gambit, Kitsch states, "I knew of him, but I didn't know the following he had. I'm sure I'm still going to be exposed to that. I love the character, I love the powers, and I love what they did with him. I didn't know that much, but in my experience, it was a blessing to go in and create my take on him. I'm excited for it, to say the least."
In 2010, Kitsch starred in Steven Silver's The Bang Bang Club, a historical drama set in South Africa which documents the final bloody days of the apartheid. He had to lose 35 pounds in two months to play the role of photojournalist Kevin Carter, alongside Ryan Phillippe and Malin Åkerman. In November 2010, The Hollywood Reporter named Kitsch as one of the young male actors who are "pushing – or being pushed" into taking over Hollywood as the new "A-List".
In the Disney film adaptation of John Carter based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel A Princess of Mars, he played the title character and a confederate soldier who gets transported to Mars. The film was released in March 2012 and made back less than a third of its budget domestically, and worldwide grosses barely recouped its production and marketing costs. Despite this, Kitsch said, "I'm very proud of John Carter. Box office doesn't validate me as a person, or as an actor." In May 2012, Kitsch starred in Peter Berg's Battleship, that is based on Hasbro's toy game, as Lieutenant Alex Hopper. It, too, failed at the domestic box office, boasting the worst opening in history for a film that cost more than $200 million. Again, international revenues are expected to help mitigate its performance. The film marked his reunion with Berg and former Friday Night Lights co-star, Jesse Plemons.[ In July 2012, he starred in Oliver Stone's Savages with Blake Lively, Salma Hayek, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. HitFix's film critic Drew McWeeny was positive of Kitsch's bond with Johnson which he described as "not only credible but lived in and authentic throughout the film". McWeeny wrote that Kitsch was used the right way in this film with an ensemble that pushes him or challenges him in scenes which resulted in him playing hard, playing intense.
In 2013, Kitsch starred in The Grand Seduction, remake of Jean-François Pouliot's French-Canadian La Grande Séduction (2003) directed by Don McKellar, and another Peter Berg film, Lone Survivor, based on Marcus Luttrell's book He plays alongside Jim Parsons, Julia Roberts and Mark Ruffalo in Ryan Murphy's The Normal Heart, whose release is planned for 2014.
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