A Redemption Arc, In Three Acts
Mark Arnold’s acting career began with stardom. Then he hit rock bottom. Now he’s ready to star again.

Photo by Alun Callender
A Redemption Arc, In Three Acts
Mark Arnold’s acting career began with stardom. Then he hit rock bottom. Now he’s ready to star again.
Mark Arnold has read thousands of scripts, auditioned for more roles than he can count, and acted in hundreds of plays, shows, and films. He knows a good story and doesn’t flinch when telling his own. Success, stardom, failure, rock bottom, and redemption—his story has it all.
Arnold’s introduction to acting came in a first-grade play at Friends’ Central, a Quaker school in suburban Philadelphia. He acted through his 12 years there. As a senior, he played Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. But Stanley Kubrick was his biggest influence. “Watching A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably what made me want to be an actor,” he says. “It was because of the richness of the storytelling and the beauty and depth of those two films.”
He landed his first professional role, in the television movie My Old Man, the week of his BU graduation. A four-year run on the soap opera The Edge of Night began about a year later, followed by a season on another soap, Santa Barbara. Arnold recalls fans mobbing him on the sidewalk in New York. In 1982, LIFE magazine included him in a feature called “Studs of the Suds.”
Arnold (’79) might be best known for one of his first film roles—the bully, Mick, in the 1985 comedy Teen Wolf. The film was a success, riding the momentum of Michael J. Fox’s rising stardom. But it didn’t vault Arnold into the sort of career he’d envisioned. New roles were few and far between. He battled alcoholism and faced family tragedy. But at the far side of those struggles, he gave acting one more chance. More than two decades later, he’s searching for the next great role.
Act I

Mark Arnold, pictured here in 1981, starred in the 1985 comedy Teen Wolf as the bully, Mick. A battle with alcoholism and family tragedy derailed his acting career. ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo
Arnold didn’t love the grind of soap operas, filming four or five days a week, but they gave him a crash course in acting. “Doing soap operas is about memorization and time management,” he says. From 1980 to 1983, he shot nearly 500 episodes of The Edge of Night. It was hard to do great work in those conditions. He wanted to act in films.
When Arnold got the audition for Teen Wolf, Fox was a young television actor from Family Ties and the story—about a teenage boy who discovers he’s a werewolf—wasn’t an obvious hit. But Arnold saw something in the script. “And then I think we made a better movie than anybody expected,” he says.
His take on Mick, the bully from a rival high school, became an iconic 1980s character, complete with a jean jacket and a handful of catchy one-liners. Arnold embodied the role, scowling through his scenes and delivering his lines—“Forget it, dork”—with spot-on aggression.
In anticipation of his pending movie stardom, Arnold left Santa Barbara. “That didn’t work,” he says. “One of the things you do as a young actor is you try to plan your career. For some people that works; for most people it doesn’t. You’re trying to control something you can’t control.”
Act II
Over the next decade, roles were scarce—a short stint on One Life to Live, a supporting role in the rom-com Threesome, an episode of Wings. Then work vanished entirely, and Arnold began drinking heavily. A six-year gap on his IMDb page reminds him of this low point.
Arnold’s mother and father died within six months of each other in 2001. He returned to Los Angeles after his father’s death and, he says, “I was just unmoored.” One morning, he and his wife got into a loud argument. Arnold recalls slumping to their kitchen floor and howling. “It was a deep, deep moaning of loss,” he says. Police knocked at the door to make sure everyone was okay.
Arnold had two clarifying thoughts that morning: He wanted to give acting one more chance. But he knew he was unemployable. “I needed divine intervention.”
The intervention came, he says, when he hit rock bottom several months later, on August 10, 2002. As Arnold was served with divorce papers, his wife called him an alcoholic. He’d been in denial until that moment. “That’s what I needed because that night I went to [an Alcoholics Anonymous] meeting,” he says. “I’ve been sober ever since.”
Sobriety didn’t guarantee work, however. Arnold’s agency had dropped him. His last job had been working at a post-production company. He vowed to take any role he could get, regardless of quality or pay. What he found were online casting calls posted by film schools, a field that had one benefit: “There’s a ton of them,” he says. “I used them to relearn how to act.” He booked up to six gigs at a time.
He also got more involved with theater—including playing the man whom Arnold credits with saving his life: Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson, in Bill W. & Dr. Bob. And some of his other acting opportunities had come at The Blank Theatre, a nonprofit in Los Angeles. There, he’d performed in the Young Playwrights Festival, which produces plays from young writers each summer using professional directors and casts.
In this scene from Teen Wolf, Arnold’s character, the bully Mick, confronts the film’s protagonist Scott, played by Michael J. Fox. Movieclips
In 2003, Dan Henning, the theater’s founder, asked Arnold if he’d take over the mentorship program, which involved helping the writers, who ranged in age from 9 to 19, through the process from script revisions to the performance. Arnold was able to help them through a formative moment in their careers, while imparting some of the lessons he’d learned in his own work. He recently resigned from the role after 20 years—he’d moved to London in 2012 and could no longer manage the time difference.
Act III
As Arnold rebuilt his acting career, his personal life also took an unexpected turn. One of the few film roles he’d landed in the 1990s was on a pair of science fiction sequels, Trancers 4: Jack of Swords and Trancers 5: Sudden Deth. While he was on location in Romania, Arnold had a relationship with a woman working on the film, but he broke it off, thinking a long-distance relationship wouldn’t work. He later searched for her online, hoping to make amends, but couldn’t find her. Then, in 2010, she emailed him. “My heart went boom,” he says. “I wrote back to her and said, ‘There you are!’”
The two married in 2011. At the same time, Arnold was starting to get small parts in television shows and films once again. Then, in 2016, he landed the role that fulfilled the childhood dreams sparked by Kubrick: He was cast in Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the classic 1982 sci-fi film, Blade Runner. The role was small, but rewarding. “I learned more in a day and a half than I’d ever learned in my career, because of the depth of storytelling,” he says.
In the Blade Runner universe, replicants—bioengineered beings, considered inferior to humans—perform the most dangerous jobs. In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling plays Officer K, a replicant who hunts and kills rogue replicants for the Los Angeles police department. Arnold plays the Interviewer, who interrogates Gosling to make sure he isn’t developing feelings. He never appears onscreen, his voice coming through a speaker on the wall, not unlike HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001.
Denis Villeneuve, the director, had been shooting for several days before Arnold and Gosling’s scene. Arnold recalls Villeneuve coming up to him during a lunch break and telling him, “I was sitting with the producers and we all agreed that today, with what you’re doing, we feel like we’re doing Blade Runner,” Arnold says. “It was very humbling.”
Today, Arnold is a busy working actor. He’s doing commercials, voice-overs, and audiobooks in addition to acting on stage and screen. Over the past four years, he has appeared in more than a dozen films, including Wrath of Man with Jason Statham and Raúl Castillo (’99) and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. He admits that the constant hustle needed to keep up with auditions is draining. But he’s thankful for the opportunity.
Early fame, personal tragedy, and an inspiring comeback anchored in a commitment to sobriety neatly splice his career into three parts—but Arnold refuses to view it that way. Shakespeare wrote in five acts. Now 67, Arnold is interested in producing. He’s doing a little writing. And he’s looking for the next great role.