Russell Harvard

In the early 1980s, the Harvards moved to Austin, Texas so that their elder son Renny could enroll at their alma mater, Texas School for the Deaf (TSD).

The family initially placed Russell (due to his speech capability and residual hearing) in an oral college for children who learn to lip read exclusively.

Finding he was unhappy there, his parents switched him to a deaf school education at TSD, which included training in lip reading and speech therapy in English.

Although he is able to hear some sound with the use of a hearing aid, including speech and music, he identifies himself Deaf and considers American Sign Language to be his first language.

Russell Wayne Harvard (born April 16, 1981) is an American actor.

After graduating from TSD in 1999, Harvard began his studies at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. At various times during his college education he took a hiatus to work as a teacher's assistant for preschoolers at the Alaska State School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Anchorage, Alaska.

At Gallaudet he appeared in a 2006 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire and as Claudio in their co-production with Amaryllis Theatre of Much Ado About Nothing.

He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted son, H.W. Plainview.

He has acted in the short films Signage (2007), Words (2010) and This Is Normal (2013), played the principal role of Tim in the independent feature Claustrophobia (2011), and had leading roles in the ASL Films Versa Effect and Gerald.

Harvard is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the Actors' Equity Association.

For The Hammer, Harvard was first cast as Matt Hamill's roommate Jay but inherited the lead role when the original choice to play Matt, the film's producer and cowriter, actor Eben Kostbar, ceded the part out of respect for the Deaf community's wishes to see an authentically Deaf actor in the role.

In the film, Kostbar played the role of Coach Cantrell, while the part of Jay went to Deaf actor Michael Anthony Spady.

The Hammer won Audience Awards at numerous film festivals, including AFI FEST, the Cleveland International Film Festival, the Florida Film Festival, the Heartland Film Festival, the Miami Film Festival and the Newport Beach Film Festival.

His earliest professional stage work was in the twin roles of the Orderly and the Groundskeeper's Son in the world premiere of Rachel Sheinkin and GrooveLily's Sleeping Beauty Wakes for Deaf West Theatre (Center Theatre Group, 2007).

With this dual performance, wrote TimeOut critic James Sims, "Harvard joins the rank of deaf actors transcending any perceived limitations due to a lack of speaking lines, capturing the heart of the newly created characters with ease."

The following year he played (also for Deaf West) Aesop in Aesop Who? In 2007, he assistant directed the young-audience musical Nobody's Perfect.

(His mother later joined him, working for the American Red Cross.) While there he contemplated a career as a teacher of theater, and in 2008 he returned as Artist in Residence.

At Gallaudet he maintained a high GPA and completed his bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts, graduating in 2008.

While at Gallaudet, Harvard was prompted by one of his professors to submit a photo and resume to casting agents seeking a deaf actor for the film There Will Be Blood.

He received an audition and won the part of H.W., for which he had to research and perform a vintage form of American Sign Language for the father-son confrontation scene with Day-Lewis.

In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill.

Shortly after completing his scenes for There Will Be Blood, Harvard made his first network television appearance in the "Silent Night" episode of CBS's CSI: NY, opposite Marlee Matlin, and later guest-starred in "The Box" episode (2010) of the Fox series Fringe.

Other TV appearances include Switched at Birth and Odd Mom Out.

Harvard also won acclaim Off Broadway in 2012 as Billy, the deaf son in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, hearing British family, in Tribes by Nina Raine.

For his interpretation, he won a 2012 Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance and nominations for Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor.

He played Mr. Wrench in the first and third seasons of the television series Fargo.

Born in Pasadena, Texas, into a third-generation deaf family, Harvard is the younger of two deaf sons of Kay (Youngblood) and Henry Harvard.

Both his parents and his paternal grandmother are also deaf.

In August 2013, the FX/MGM production team of Fargo, the anthology TV miniseries adaptation of the 1996 Coen brothers' film, cast Harvard as Mr. Wrench, one of two hitmen who pursue Billy Bob Thornton's lead character Lorne Malvo throughout the first season of the series.

Writer-creator Noah Hawley, a part-time Austin resident who lives near the Texas School for the Deaf, cited his own neighborhood encounters with sign language as the inspiration for the "Mr. Wrench" character: a deaf assassin who uses his command of ASL as a means of menace toward his targets and of private communication with his partner Mr. Numbers (played by Adam Goldberg).

During the five-month shoot in Calgary, Alberta, Harvard and the show's ASL manager, Catherine MacKinnon, worked closely with Goldberg on translating the pair's dialogue into the most effective ASL exchanges for their scenes.

Critical response to Harvard and Goldberg's seriocomic turn as bickering hired killers was overwhelmingly positive.

Reviewers noted that they "steal scenes as Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench" (Time), make up one of the "satisfying subplots" (HuffPost) and "have their own original energy" (Vulture.com) For Alan Sepinwall of Uproxx, "the relationship between Goldberg . . . and Harvard feels unlike any criminal twosome of its type I've seen before, even in the midst of a show that is otherwise cleverly rearranging familiar pieces of the movie and other crime stories."

And Tim Goodman, TV critic for The Hollywood Reporter, wrote, "Encapsulating everything that is joyously weird about Fargo, the killers are the dangerous—and deaf—Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard) and his partner and translator, Mr. Numbers (Adam Goldberg). Already I want a separate series that just follows around Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers."

Series creator Hawley, moreover, who has described Harvard as "magnetic and charismatic" in the role of Mr. Wrench, ended up extending the character's appearance in the series.

On June 19, 2014, the Broadcast Television Journalists Association honored Fargo with three awards (including Best Mini-series) at the Critics' Choice Television Awards ceremony.

Fargo also won three Emmys—most prominently Outstanding Miniseries—at the 66th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on August 25, 2014; Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television at the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 11, 2015; and, for "majestically reinventing a beloved tale and for expanding and richly rendering a darkly comic world of crime, revenge, and comeuppance", was honored with a 2014 Peabody Award, whose citation recognized Fargo as having set "a new standard for what is possible in the process of adaptation."

Harvard would reprise his role of Mr. Wrench in Season 3 of the series.

Harvard cites his seeing, at age eight, his cousin perform on stage in The Wizard of Oz as the inspiration for his becoming an actor.

Subsequently, he became very involved in theater at TSD.