Damon Herriman is the face you place a beat late: the hillbilly, the band manager, the cult leader, the friend at the edge of the frame. He does a great deal with a little; lately his films have given him only the little.
Fi1m perspective
Watch The Bikeriders (2024) and try to find him. He is Brucie, one of Jeff Nichols's Vandals, and our review did not mention him at all, which is in its way the point. He fits the group so completely that you look through him at Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer. That is what Herriman does: he arrives, belongs, and lets the film forget he was ever a hire.
He has been doing it since he was eight, on Australian television, and in The Big Steal (1990) he was the bespectacled friend, the part that exists to make the lead look braver. House of Wax (2005) gave him an American credit and, by his own account, the career he has had since. Then came Dewey Crowe in Justified (2010–15), the dimwitted hillbilly who kept coming back, and American television decided what he was for: the outsider, the redneck, the man who is not quite right. In 2019 he played Charles Manson twice, at length in Mindhunter and briefly in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, and if you want to know what casting directors see when they look at him, that is the answer. We have not reviewed those, so we will only say that the pattern is plain.
The two recent parts we have reviewed test the pattern and find its limit. In Better Man (2024) he is Nigel Martin-Smith, the manager who runs Take That, and Michael Gracey's script gives him a villain from a pantomime. Herriman plays it with total commitment, which is both the job and the problem, because there is nothing under the commitment to find. We kept waiting for one scene in which the film would let him be a person with a reason, and it never came, and we were more irritated by that than by anything the digital chimpanzee did. A controlling man is his home ground; a cardboard one is a waste of him.
Neagley (2026) wastes him differently. His Lawrence Cole exists so that Maria Sten's character can have her past explained, in scenes J. J. Geiger cuts slowly as if they were the reason we were watching, when Sten has already told us everything with her face. Herriman does exactly what the script asks and no more, and there is no more to do. A character actor is only as good as the character, and here there is not one.
The next director to hand him a man with a private life rather than a function will find out what he is worth. On the evidence of the last two years, nobody has been in a hurry to try.
Biography
Damon Herriman is an Australian actor born on 31 March 1970 in Adelaide, South Australia. He began his career as a child actor in Australian television, appearing in series including The Sullivans. His father, Noel Herriman, is also an actor.
Herriman is known for his role as Dewey Crowe in the series Justified (2010–2015). He portrayed Charles Manson in both the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) and the film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). Other credits include The Bikeriders (2023) as Brucie and Better Man (2024) as Nigel Martin-Smith.
He won the AACTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in Judy & Punch (2019) and received an AACTA nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for The Nightingale (2018).
