Bill Camp
American actor

Bill Camp (born 1963 or 1964) is an American actor. He has played supporting roles in many films such as Lincoln (2012), Compliance (2012), Lawless (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013), Love & Mercy (2015), Loving (2016), Molly's Game (2017), Vice (2018), Wildlife (2018), Joker (2019), News of the World (2021), and Sound of Freedom (2023); the HBO miniseries The Night Of in 2016 and The Outsider in 2020; and the Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit in 2020. He had a recurring role in the HBO drama series The Leftovers from 2015 to 2017 and the Hulu space drama series The First in 2018.
Camp has appeared in many television series and received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role in The Night Of and for the legal thriller series Presumed Innocent (2024). He was nominated for a Tony Award for his role in the 2016 Broadway revival of the play The Crucible.
Early life
Camp was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Groton, the son of Patricia L., a librarian, and Peter B. Camp, who was an assistant headmaster at the Groton School. He attended the University of Vermont but left without a degree, later graduating from the Juilliard School.
Career
Theatre
Initially, Camp was largely active in theater, but has subsequently taken on character roles in both film and television. In 2002, he left acting and temporarily changed professions (working as a cook and mechanic), only to return two years later in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, for which he won an Obie Award (Off-Broadway Theater Awards).
Among his works on Broadway are Heartbreak House (2006), Death of a Salesman (2012) and The Crucible (2016).
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3639959. VIAF identifies the subject as 171458653. The Library of Congress control number is no2006043815. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 1964, 2012 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Camp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.