Peter STORMARE

Stormare was born in Kumla, Närke, Sweden, and grew up in Arbrå, Hälsingland, Sweden as Peter Ingvar Rolf Storm, but changed his surname when he discovered he shared it with a senior student at the acting academy. His original choice of name, Retep Mrots (his own name spelled backwards), was rejected. Just like storm (a word which means the same in Swedish as in English), "stormare" is a Swedish word, meaning "stormer".

Stormare began his career with the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which he belonged for eleven years. In 1990 he took a leading position (Associate Artistic Director) at the Tokyo Globe Theatre and made a name for himself through various Shakespeare performances including Hamlet. Three years later, he went to New York and mainly took part there in English language productions. In Sweden, he has worked with Ingmar Bergman, by whom he was apparently discovered. He has also played Carl Hamilton, a fictional Swedish secret agent similar to James Bond.

He was critically praised for his role as a quiet and ruthless villain (with Steve Buscemi) in Fargo (1996), and later played a sleazy, unlicensed "eye doctor" ("Solomon Eddie") in Minority Report. He portrayed "Dieter Stark" in the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

In 1998 he appeared in "The Frogger", a Seinfeld episode where he played a "rogue electrician" known as "Slippery Pete". He portrayed "Uli Kunkel" in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, as well as playing "Lev Andropov", the Russian Cosmonaut in 1998's Armageddon, and Alexey in the 2003 summer blockbuster Bad Boys II.

In the 2005 film Constantine, Stormare played Lucifer. He played an interrogator in the 2005 movie The Brothers Grimm. His first major character in television was on the show Prison Break in 2005, where he played Mob Boss "John Abruzzi". Stormare was originally cast for the role of Fido, but upon being cast in Prison Break, he opted out of the film. In 2007 he portrayed a brothel owner on one episode of CSI.

He also was the voice of "Mattias Nilsson" in the videogame Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the voice of "Isair" in the computer game Icewind Dale 2 and the voice of "Johann Strauss" in Quake 4. In February 2006, he starred as "Wolfgang" in Volkswagen's VDub series of television commercials. He is once again voicing "Mattias Nilsson" in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames.

Stormare is contracted to play the main character in the Swedish upcoming movie "Svartvattnet", which is going to be filmed in Sweden and Norway during 2007.

Stormare has also been offered a role in the ABC television series Lost for a period of one year.

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