Adrian Pasdar

With athletic good looks and a sexy but mysterious air, this former college football player has a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. Although he made his film debut in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, his breakout role came a year later as a reluctant vampire in the indie flick Near Dark. Able to embody sexy and scary simultaneously, Pasdar seemed poised to join the ranks of '80s leading men such as Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland. Instead, the rebel player quit the biz for two years. In the '90s he came back, turning in a string of solid supporting performances in mostly forgettable films and TV-movies, which prompted him to quit a second time. (During his hiatus he worked the register in a diner.) But performing won out in the end and when Pasdar returned, he turned to the small screen for meaty parts, winning kudos (if not viewers) as the corrupt title character in the short-lived 1996 series Profit. His marriage to Dixie Chick Natalie Maines and a recurring role on Judging Amy as a dangerous love interest for the title character raised his profile in the 2000s, and suddenly the veteran actor was enjoying name recognition for the first time in his spotty career. His career skyrocketed, however, when, in 2006, he took on the role of high-flying politician Nathan Petrelli in the NBC smash hit Heroes.