Biography

Connor Ratliff was born on August 27, 1975 in Jefferson City, Missouri, USA. He is an actor and writer, known for Dead Eyes (2020), Widow's Bay (2026) and Run Amok (2026).

At age 10 won a local contest to name the mascot of Lion's Frozen Custard. He was awarded $50 for his submission, "Leopolitan".

Ratliff's mom Greta was active in community theater in Jefferson City, Missouri, and his dad Bill covered the weather for KRCG as well as hosting a local children's television show called Showtime.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, for his podcast Ratliff recorded his audio inside a blanket fort he constructed on a bedroom floor at his parents' house in Missouri. He had been performing in St. Louis nearby on tour when the lockdowns began, and decided to stay with his parents instead of flying back to New York.

In 2000, Ratliff was cast as Private John Zielinski on Band of Brothers (2001) but was fired the day before he was supposed to film his scenes. He was told that series co-creator Tom Hanks believed Ratliff had "dead eyes". Two decades later, Ratliff started a podcast, Dead Eyes, to explore experiences with rejection in the entertainment industry, life disappointments in general, and how people rebuild from that. Tom Hanks himself was interviewed on Season 3 of the podcast.

Getting rejected doesn't mean you're not a good actor, it just means you're not what they're looking for, you know?

Dead Eyes has to do with a thing that happened to me, and the way that thing becomes a kind of topic that can unfold in different directions. So the podcast is not a parody. It's true. It's a nonfiction personal investigation series.

The aspect that really stuck in my brain was being told that I had dead eyes. There's that rule, you know, when it comes to camera work, you need to see the eyes. That's the most important part of the face, acting wise.

Sometimes you learn what you're supposed to learn in class, and sometimes the more important things you learn are from things that go wrong or just happen to you. You have to be on the lookout for those, so when you have a bad experience it's not just a bad experience. You want to be able to try and learn from it.