American actor Hamish Linklater was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on July 7, 1976, and is the son of vocal trainer Kristin Linklater. His mother is also a Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Acting Division at Columbia University. She raised her son in the Berkshires, where she was a founder of the Shakespeare & Company drama troupe. When Hamish was eight, she trained him to take a part in theatre productions. He played numerous Shakespearean roles, no matter how small they were. He later attended the Commonwealth School in Boston and was educated at Amherst College. He first established himself on the stage, earning theatre credits like Singing Forest and Recent Tragic Events.
In 2000, Hamish Linklater made his big screen debut on Groove, which was an official selection of that year’s Sundance Film Festival. His next project was portraying the character Richard Roth, a CNN correspondent, on the HBO movie Live from Baghdad. He was later cast as a regular on the series Gideon’s Crossing, and gained a recurring role on American Dreams. He was also seen on series like Happy Family and Dragnet, and was given a part on 2003’s Final Draft. He later got a role on the TV production 5ive Days to Midnight and worked on short films like The Sailor’s Girl and Everything’s Gone Green. In 2005, he played the character Leonard on the blockbuster film Fantastic Four, starring Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis. He later joined the cast of the comedy series The New Adventures of Old Christine, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He also appeared on the dark comedy series Pushing Daisies, playing the character John Joseph Jacobs on the episode “Girth.” He has also been seen in the premiere of Richard Greenberg's Violet Hour and was in the New York and Los Angeles premieres of Good Thing at the New Group and Center Theatre Group, respectively. Linklater's other New York theatre credits include Hamlet, Love's Fire, Romeo and Juliet, The Square, Chemistry of Change, Measure for Measure and A Midsummer
Night's Dream.