Bio
Elias Koteas is a Canadian actor best known for his roles in The Prophecy, Fallen and the live-action first and third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films.
He also had a starring role in the medical drama television series Combat Hospital (2011) and a starring role as James Skinner, the well-respected, well-regarded leader of Seattle's Special Investigations Unit, in the third and final season of the mystery crime drama television series The Killing, in 2013.
Early in his career, director Francis Ford Coppola cast Koteas in both Gardens of Stone and Tucker. Koteas then landed a role in Peter Masterson's Full Moon In Blue Water and was later chosen for the lead role in Roger Cardinal's explosive Malarek, playing true-life investigative journalist Victor Malarek.
His performance earned Koteas the first of two Genie nominations (Canada's Oscar) for Best Actor.
Koteas broke out as an international sensation after his starring role in Crash, David Cronenberg's highly controversial exploration of sexual provocation and alienation which was awarded a special prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.
Koteas has worked on several occasions with one of Canada's most accomplished directorial exports, Atom Egoyan, starring in Egoyan's The Adjuster and Exotica, for which Koteas garnered a Genie nomination for Best Supporting Actor; and Ararat, for which he won the Genie for Best Supporting Actor.
Koteas has portrayed notable roles in many films, including Some Kind of Wonderful, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Steven Shainberg's Hit Me, a modern noir adaptation of Jim Thompson's A Swell Looking Babe; Gattaca, Gregory Hoblit's supernatural thriller Fallen; Bryan Singer's Apt Pupil; Living Out Loud, Terrence Malick's Academy Award-nominated film The Thin Red Line; Novocaine, Harrison's Flowers, David Fincher-directed Zodiac; Shooter, directed by Antoine Fuqua; David Fincher's Curious Case Of Benjamin Button; Haunting In Connecticut; Two Lovers, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island; Defendor, Michel Winterbottom's Killer Inside Me; the Matt Reeves' film Let Me In, based on the 2004 novel Let The Right One In by Swedish writer John Ajvide Lindqvist; and 3 Backyards.
Koteas also appeared in Dream House, a thriller directed by Jim Sheridan; the feature film Winnie, where he plays a South African apartheid supporter and Harold and Kumar 3.
On television, Koteas has had several critically hailed performances in such programs as USA Network's Emmy-nominated, Traffic: The Mini-Series; the HBO original movie Shot In The Heart, in which he played notorious murderer Gary Gilmore; in HBO's Sugartime; and House.
Koteas has starred in numerous theatre productions, including Paula Vogel's Hot N' Throbbing at the Signature Theatre, Kiss Of The Spider Woman at the Yale Repertory Theatre and True West on Broadway, directed by Matthew Warchus.
Koteas is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a member of the prestigious Actors' Studio.