Matthew Modine has worked with lots of the greats: Stanley Kubrick, as wise-cracking marine JT “Joker” Davis in Full Metal Jacket; Jonathan Demme, as a goofy FBI agent in Married to the Mob; John Schlesinger, as a hapless landlord in nightmare-tenant thriller Pacific Heights; Alan Parker, as the avian-obsessed kid in Birdy; and Robert Altman (twice) in Streamers and Short Cuts. More recently he’s had a couple of turns for Christopher Nolan: the Batman-wary deputy commissioner of Gotham in The Dark Knight Rises and American engineer Vannevar Bush in Oppenheimer.
On the small screen, he has played a womanising real estate developer in Weeds, a billionaire inventor in Proof and the evil – no, wait! – saviour doctor who tries to help Eleven escape in the last series of Stranger Things. He also famously turned down Tom Cruise’s role in Top Gun, Michael J Fox’s lead role in Back to the Future, and Tom Hank’s lead role in Big, which he might be up for talking about.
Now Modine returns as a cycling coach, in coming-of-age sports drama Hard Miles, who takes an unlikely crew of incarcerated students on a gruelling bike ride from Denver to the Grand Canyon. Cycling is certainly something he’d be happy to chat about: he heads a pro-bike organisation called Bicycle for a Day and cycles around his home city of New York.
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