Patrick Fischler

Fischler was born on December 29, 1969. His father, Bill, bought a restaurant on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, California, while Fischler was five years old, and named it "Patrick's Roadhouse" after him. The restaurant is a 'hot-spot' for celebrities Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Penn, Goldie Hawn, and Johnny Carson. After graduating from high school, Fischler attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts; there, he met and started dating his future wife, actress Lauren Bowles, half-sister of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus.After graduating from Tisch, Fischler and Bowles moved back to Los Angeles; there, along with other New York University graduates, they formed a theater group called Neurotic Young Urbanites. An agent saw Fischler perform at a Neurotic Young Urbanites production, then arranged for him to attend an audition for the 1994 action film Speed, Fischler's first film acting job. In the film, Fischler played one of the men trapped inside an elevator but which nearly falls due to an attack by a bomber. In 1998, Fischler starred in the independent film The Week That Girl Died, a romantic comedy about three long-time friends in a small New England fishing town. For the part, he received a best lead actor award by the American Film Institute International Film Festival's New Directions jury, which honors independent films. Fischler appeared in David Lynch's 2001 psychological thriller Mulholland Drive as a man describing a nightmare he had. 2002, he appeared in the television film Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, a biopic about comedian Gilda Radner; he portrayed Eugene Levy. He appeared in the films Twister (1996), Ghost World (2001), and Old School (2003). and The Great Buck Howard (2008), and portrayed Ellis Loew in Brian De Palma's 2006 crime film The Black Dahlia. The character was referred to in the film as "Jewboy"; film reviewer Stephen Cole called his role "a caricature as coarsely antisemitic as any sequence in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ." Fischler appeared as a guest star in television shows Angel, Nash Bridges, Burn Notice, Lie to Me, Bones, Cold Case, Monk, Star Trek: Enterprise, Girlfriends, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, and CSI: NY. By 2009, he had more than 60 film and television credits.