Jonathan Silverman

The Weight of a Corpse in the Hamptons

Jonathan Silverman was born in Los Angeles in 1966 and grew up in a household where law and academia reigned. But he preferred the stage. His professional debut was not a stroke of luck at a shopping mall but a serious apprenticeship on the Broadway boards.

In 1986, he starred in the film adaptation of Brighton Beach Memoirs. Directed by Gene Saks, he played a young Eugene Jerome and proved he could carry a Neil Simon script with ease. That movie gave him the big break he needed to break into the industry.

And then came the summer of 1989.

No one expected a black comedy about two employees hauling their dead boss around to gross 30 million dollars. In Weekend at Bernie's, Silverman shared the screen with Andrew McCarthy, and the success was so huge that the studio pushed for a sequel in 1993. Filming in the U.S. Virgin Islands cemented his reputation as an actor who could handle the most extreme physical comedy.

Comedy became his natural habitat.

From Cult Cinema to the Tyranny of Television

In the mid-nineties, his career shifted. Silverman realized that television offered a stability that Hollywood was beginning to deny actors of his profile. In 1995, he took the lead role in the NBC series The Single Guy.

The series lasted two seasons and aired 40 episodes before it was canceled. Still, Silverman had already built a solid network of contacts in American television. In the years that followed, he appeared in projects such as CSI: Miami and White Collar, where he set aside comedy to explore more restrained characters.

Not everything in his career was a commercial success.

In 2003, he tried his hand at directing with the feature film Another Night. It was an attempt to control the creative process from behind the camera, but the film went largely unnoticed by the general public. After that setback, he returned to acting full-time, alternating supporting roles in independent films with guest appearances on episodic television.

Behind the Camera and New Projects

Silverman's personal life became intertwined with his career when he married actress Jennifer Finnigan in 2007. Together, they looked for projects to work on, and in 2014 they co-directed the comedy-drama The Opposite Sex. It was a low-budget shoot that aimed to recapture the spirit of character-driven stories from the 1980s.

In 2021, he joined the cast of the Canadian series Moonshine, where he played Ken Bennett for three seasons and showed that his talent for fast-paced dialogue remained sharp decades after his early work with Neil Simon. Filming the show in Nova Scotia kept him busy until production wrapped in 2023.

Drama was his lifeline.

In 2024, he took part in the Netflix series No Good Deed. On this project, he worked under Liz Feldman on a story that mixes the real estate market with dark secrets. Silverman plays a key supporting character who appears in several episodes of the first season, filmed entirely on location in Los Angeles.

His filmography now exceeds one hundred titles across film and television. Despite industry shifts, he still lives on the West Coast and remains active in independent production. In 2025, two dramatic projects are scheduled for release and are currently in technical post-production.