Dustin Milligan

The casting that almost ended his career

Dustin Milligan was born in 1985 in Yellowknife, a Canadian city where the thermometer easily drops below minus thirty degrees. His move to Vancouver to try to become an actor was anything but glamorous. He worked in coffee shops and filmed local commercials before landing tiny roles in horror films such as Final Destination 3 in 2006.

In 2008, the CW network cast him to star in 90210, the much-anticipated return of the most famous teen series of the nineties. He was the first actor signed for the project, and his face plastered bus stops across half the world. But the industry is fickle, and his contract ended abruptly after the first season.

That firing was a hard blow.

Many actors in his position would have disappeared after such a public failure. But Milligan decided to stay in Los Angeles and look for projects that moved away from the high school heartthrob stereotype. In 2010, he starred in Repeaters, a dark thriller that almost nobody saw but that helped him shed his image as a manufactured product.

There was no turning back.

The Vet Who Won Over the Emmys

His luck changed in 2015 when he joined the cast of Schitt's Creek. The series started as a small Canadian television production with a very tight budget. He played Ted Mullens for five years, and his chemistry with Annie Murphy was the emotional anchor of the plot.

And the gamble paid off.

The series ended up making history at the 2020 Emmy Awards by winning every major comedy category. Milligan wasn't looking for the spotlight, but he ended up at the center of a global phenomenon thanks to a character who was simply a good guy. Success came to him at age thirty-five, an age when many have already given up on Hollywood.

In 2021, he landed a leading role in Rutherford Falls, a Peacock series where he got to play his most cynical and political side. But his interest in producing started to outweigh pure acting. In 2022, he appeared in the film The People We Hate at the Wedding alongside Allison Janney.

His work pace didn't slow down during the 2023 writers' strikes. In 2024, his addition to the main cast of The Hunting Party for NBC was confirmed. In this project he plays Jack Kessler, a high-level investigator who must capture the country's most dangerous fugitives. Filming for the first season was scheduled to wrap on locations in the United States and Canada with a budget of forty million dollars.