Career
In 1995, Phifer attended an open casting call for director Spike Lee’s Clockers, beating over a thousand others to get the lead role as a narcotics dealer embroiled in a murder cover-up. He followed that role with another in the comedy spoof feature High School High (which also starred his former wife Malinda Williams) and continued by co-starring in the fright flick I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr.
He portrayed Dr. Gregory Pratt on the medical drama ER, which he started in April 2002. Phifer left the show in September 2008, in the first episode of Season 15. His character during the conclusion of the season 14 finale cliffhanger involving an ambulance explosion that was rigged to kill an injured FBI informant (Steve Buscemi). During his 6 years in the show, he was nominated twice for an NAACP Award.
Phifer’s television credits include the movies The Tuskegee Airmen (1995), HBO's Subway Stories: Tales from the Underground (1997), and Brian's Song (2001) (as former Chicago Bear Gale Sayers). He received additional notice for his performance opposite singer Beyoncé Knowles (from Destiny's Child) on MTV’s alternative take on the Carmen legend with the movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera (2001). Phifer guest-starred in the series Homicide: Life on the Street and New York Undercover. Likewise, he earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for another TV movie, A Lesson Before Dying, opposite Don Cheadle. In 2009, Phifer began a guest-starring arc on the Fox drama Lie to Me.
Among Phifer’s other big-screen credits are Soul Food, The Biography of Spud Webb, Hell’s Kitchen, NYC, Tears of a Clown, O (as the titular character Odin a.k.a. O), and the thriller Uninvited Guest (as Silk). He appeared in Impostor as well as Paid in Full and director Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile, opposite Eminem. He is mentioned in the Grammy and Academy Award winning song "Lose Yourself" by Eminem.
Mekhi Phifer will appear as a guest on Season 2 of Top Chef Masters.
In June 2011, Phifer starred alongside John Barrowman and Eve Myles as CIA agent Rex Matheson in Torchwood: Miracle Day, the fourth series of the BBC/Starz Entertainment television show Torchwood.
Phifer stars as Agent Collins in the fourth season of White Collar.
Phifer made a guest appearance on the sitcom series Husbands in its second season.
Read more about this topic: Mekhi Phifer
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)