Barry Robert Pepper (born April 4, 1970) is a Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and Emmy-nominated Canadian-born actor.
Pepper was born in Campbell River, British Columbia. He spent much of his early life traveling the world in a homemade ship.
When Barry was five years old, the family set sail. Pepper and his family navigated through the South Pacific islands for five years.
His education was completed in both public schools and correspondence courses. Due to the lack of television as entertainment, the family used sketch acting as a means of fun. When the family had finished their travels, they returned to Canada and set up a shop on Denman Island off Vancouver Island. The Peppers returned to Canada where they built a farm on a small Island off the West Coast of British Columbia. After two years in college, he discovered his acting passion through his involvement in the Vancouver Actors Studio.
Hollywood hype being Hollywood hype, Pepper was soon being hailed as a Next Big Thing by any number of publications and his role as a prison guard in the hotly anticipated The Green Mile (1999) seemed to attest to this status. Whether the young actor really was a star in the making or not, his career had gotten off to an positive start.
He is best known for his role as the religious sniper, Private Daniel Jackson, in Saving Private Ryan; as Dean Stanton in The Green Mile, as journalist Joseph L. Galloway in We Were Soldiers, his leading role in the movie Battlefield Earth, his depiction of Roger Maris in Billy Crystal's HBO film 61*, and as Dale Earnhardt in the ESPN movie 3: The Dale Earnhardt Story. He appeared in the Jagged Edge music video Goodbye.
Pepper has been married to his wife Cindy, since November 1997. They have one daughter, named Annaliese, born on June 17, 2000.