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Matthew Stephen Tompkins is an American actor born in Washington D.C. and raised in Oklahoma City. He is an award-winning performer in theater, film, and television, as well as an indie filmmaker and producer, with more than 50 feature films, 80 TV roles, and over 100 professional plays to his name. He currently resides in Dallas, Texas, where he founded the successful independent film production company Wolfclan Productions in 2003. Influenced by his cinema- and literature-loving parents, Matthew began writing and directing Super 8 films in his neighborhood by age 10, projecting them on the walls of his childhood home to the delight of family and friends.
Matthew pursued serious acting studies at the university level. After performing leading roles in various plays and touring Washington State with the theater department’s improv group, Players 5, he wrote and directed two of the only student-written productions ever staged in the over 100-year history of his alma mater, Whitworth University in Spokane, WA. Graduating in 1989 with a degree in English Literature and Theater Arts, he moved to New York City to work as an actor and playwright with the Off-Broadway Cooper Square Theater and Playlab Studio Theater. He also audited acting classes with the late Bill Hickey and Uta Hagen at HB Studios.
Relocating to Dallas in 1991, Matthew began his professional television and film career with recurring roles on shows such as CBS’s Walker, Texas Ranger, Prison Break, and the Peabody and Emmy-winning PBS children’s program Wishbone. His initial representation was by the late Peggy Taylor, a pioneering and beloved franchised talent agent in the Southwest. Following her passing, Matthew was represented by the Kim Dawson Talent Agency and the Mary Collins Agency for several years, securing steady work in episodic TV (including 11-22-63, The Gifted, Longmire, In Plain Sight, Chase, The Good Guys, Exposed, The Deep End, Friday Night Lights, Shadow 44, Adventures in Zero World, and Pink), made-for-TV movies, feature films, and national commercials.
His theater career in Dallas/Fort Worth earned him seven Dallas/Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum Awards for Outstanding Actor between 1993 and 2009. He received acclaim for leading roles such as King Henry II in Becket, Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, Lenny in Of Mice and Men, Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, Sharkey in The Seafarer, the title role in Othello, and portraying the American author Nelson Algren in Transatlantic Liaison. Recent theater highlights include reprising Nelson Algren in an extended Off-Broadway run of the New York Times-acclaimed two-person play Transatlantic Liaison at the Harold Clurman Theater, and portraying Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Tony Award-winning Dallas Theater Center.
In film, Matthew’s notable roles include a key Secret Service agent in Parkland, produced by Tom Hanks and Playtone and directed by Peter Landesman (alongside Paul Giamatti and Billy Bob Thornton); Jesse Garza in the Academy Award-nominated Sicario, directed by Denis Villeneuve (with Josh Brolin, Emily Blunt, and Daniel Kaluuya); Secret Service Agent Clint Hill in 11-22-63, produced by J.J. Abrams (opposite James Franco and Chris Cooper); Officer Braddock in the cryptocurrency thriller Crypto (with Kurt Russell and Luke Hemsworth); and co-producing the dark romantic comedy Hooking Up (starring Brittany Snow and Sam Richardson).
Matthew and Wolfclan Productions, along with producing partner Jon Keeyes and Highland Myst Entertainment, are actively producing genre-specific feature films. Past projects include indie cult favorites such as American Nightmare, Living and Dying, Fall Down Dead, The Fragility of Seconds, Radiant, and Killing Down. Recent releases include the psychological horror thrillers Freaks (Indican Pictures/Lionsgate), Doom Room (Summerhill Films), and The Harrowing (Film Mode Entertainment/Vertical Entertainment). They are also developing new film slates and the Victorian science fiction/steampunk television series The Mechanical Grave, inspired by the global success of the short film of the same name.
Matthew has been married to Shauna McLean Tompkins since 2006, and they have two children. He is currently represented for all media by the Linda McAlister Talent Agency.
