Not Bad For a Human

by Lance Henriksen, Joseph Maddrey

With well over 150 films to his name, Lance Henriksen is a Hollywood icon. He’s best known as the empathetic android Bishop in Aliens and the intuitive criminal profiler Frank Black in the TV series Millennium, but he has also played gunfighters, gangsters, an astronaut, a vampire, a sadistic monk, Charles Bronson, and Abraham Lincoln. He’s mentored Tarzan, Evel Knievel, and the Antichrist, and fought Terminators, Aliens, Predators, Pumpkinhead, Pinhead, Bigfoot, Superman, the Autobots, Mr. T, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal. He’s worked with directors James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Sidney Lumet, Francois Truffaut, John Huston, Walter Hill, David Fincher, John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Sam Raimi… but this is just skimming the surface.

Henriksen is a true artist – a painter, a potter, and a creative collaborator who brings complexity and humanity to all of his work by drawing on real life experiences that are often stranger than fiction. Not Bad For a Human celebrates the actor’s screen persona, film by film, and recounts the chaotic upbringing and early life experiences that shaped him – revealing the man behind the image.

Co-written with author Joseph Maddrey, Not Bad For a Human was first published in 2011 and quickly garnered acclaim from critics and readers alike. Harker Press is proud to bring the book back into circulation after being out of print for a decade. This new edition features a revised text, additional rare photos, and a new afterword.

359 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 22, 2025

About the author

An intense, versatile actor as adept at playing clean-cut FBI agents as he is psychotic motorcycle-gang leaders, who can go from portraying soulless, murderous vampires to burned-out, world-weary homicide detectives, Lance Henriksen has starred in a variety of films that have allowed him to stretch his talents just about as far as an actor could possibly hope. He played "Awful Knoffel" in the TNT original movie Evel Knievel (2004) (TV), directed by John Badham and executive produced by Mel Gibson. Henriksen portrayed "Awful Knoffel" in this project based on the life of the famed daredevil, played by George Eads. Henriksen starred for three seasons (1996-1999) on "Millennium" (1996/I), Fox-TV's critically acclaimed series created by Chris Carter ("The X-Files" (1993)). His performance as Frank Black, a retired FBI agent who has the ability to get inside the minds of killers, landed him three consecutive Golden Globe nominations for "Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Drama Series" and a People's Choice Award nomination for "Favorite New TV Male Star".

Born in New York, Henriksen studied at the Actors Studio and began his career off-Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's "Three Plays of the Sea." One of his first film appearances was as an FBI agent in Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975), followed by parts in Lumet's Network (1976) and Prince of the City (1981). He then appeared in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) with Richard Dreyfuss and François Truffaut, Damien: Omen II (1978) and in Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983), in which he played Mercury astronaut Capt. Wally Schirra.

James Cameron cast Henriksen in his first directorial effort, Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981), then used him again in The Terminator (1984) and as the android Bishop in the sci-fi classic Aliens (1986). Sam Raimi cast Henriksen as an outrageously garbed gunfighter in his quirky western The Quick and the Dead (1995). Henriksen has also appeared in what has developed into a cult classic: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987), in which he plays the head of a clan of murderous redneck vampires. He was nominated for a Golden Satellite Award for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the TNT original film The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1998) (TV).

In addition to his abilities as an actor, Henriksen is an accomplished painter and potter. His talent as a ceramist has enabled him to create some of the most unusual ceramic artworks available on the art market today. He resides in Southern California with his wife Jane and their five-year-old daughter Sage.