This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
Martin Henderson’s love of television began early. As a young boy in the 1980s, long before TV broadcasting ran 24 hours a day, Henderson would wake up every weekend and put the TV on, just to sit in front of the test pattern. “I was such a TV junkie, it didn’t matter what it was,” Henderson told The Spinoff from Los Angeles. “Doctor Who, The Dukes of Hazzard, MacGyver, the A Team, Chips, the news. I watched literally everything.”
That early love of television saw a young Henderson score his first onscreen role in the Margaret Mahy kidult drama Strangers in 1989. At the age of 17, he joined a plucky new soap called Shortland Street and played wayward teen Stuart Neilson for three years, before Hollywood beckoned. Over the next two decades, Henderson starred in movies like The Ring, Bride and Prejudice and Everest, and won major roles in dramas like Off the Map and Grey’s Anatomy. He currently stars as Jack Sheridan in Netflix’s hit drama Virgin River – and of course, we cannot forget his cameo with Britney Spears in her iconic Toxic video.
