Russell Harvard

Russell Harvard
Russell Harvard at the NY premiere of Tribes, March 4, 2012
Born	Russell Wayne Harvard (1981-04-16) 16 April 1981 (age 35) Pasadena, Texas, United States
Occupation	Actor
Years active	2006–present

Russell Wayne Harvard (born April 16, 1981) is an American actor. He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted grown son, H.W. Plainview. In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill. 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 Season 1 of FX's 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 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 school 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 as Deaf and considers American Sign Language to be his first language.