An intelligent, highly-capable actor, Sam Trammell made inroads on the New York stage while building an intriguing career in mostly independent features. The West Virginia native attended Brown University where he gravitated to acting in his senior year. Trammell made his film debut as an intern at a tabloid TV talk show in the little-seen “The Hotel Manor” (1994) and kept busy with auditioned and day-player roles on daytime serials. He made his primetime debut with a featured role in the 1996 CBS/Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation “Harvest of Fire” and won some attention as a man who has an affair with the mother of a friend in “Childhood’s End” (1996). Returning to NYC, Trammell garnered attention and good reviews for a trio of stage performances. He was compulsive gambler in his Off-Broadway debut “Dealer’s Choice”, a gay man in “My Night With Reg” and earned a Tony nomination as the authorial stand-in in the Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s comedy “Ah, Wilderness!” in 1998. Within months of capturing NYC audiences, the actor reached a wider constituency as the fast-talking ex-con Sonny Dupree in the quirky ABC comedy-drama “Maximum Bob”. Later that year, Trammell was briefly seen as the youngest son in a large Irish Catholic family in “Trinity” (NBC).
Trammell returned to the stage in 1999, playing the troubled offspring of an award-winning TV actress (essayed by Elizabeth Ashley) in the unsuccessful drama “If Memory Serves”. 2000, though, proved a better year as the actor had a supporting role as a male hustler in the Sundance-screened “Beat”, saw the release of “Followers”, an affecting drama in which he played a would-be pledge to a fraternity who makes several decisions with tragic repercussions, and portrayed twins in the dramatic road movie “Fear of Fiction”. Trammell rounded out the year garnering rave reviews for his turn as the title character’s male lover in the Off-Broadway play “Kit Marlowe”, about the Elizabethan playwright.
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