Bronson Alcott Pinchot (; born May 20, 1959) is an American actor. He made his television debut as Dennis Kemper, one of the earliest regular gay characters on an American television series, on the 1985 NBC sitcom Sara. Pinchot is known for playing Balki Bartokomous on the ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers (1986–1993), for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, and Serge in the Beverly Hills Cop film series (1984–2024).
Pinchot has also performed in films including Risky Business (1983), The Flamingo Kid (1984), After Hours (1985), True Romance (1993) and The First Wives Club (1996), and in television series such as Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1994–1995), Ray Donovan (2015), Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Lodge 49 (2019) and The Residence (2025). In 2012, he starred in his own reality series, The Bronson Pinchot Project, on the DIY Network.
Pinchot has worked extensively as an audiobook narrator, with over 400 recordings as of 2024. In 2010, he was named as AudioFile magazine's Best Voice in Fiction & Classic and Audible's Narrator of the Year. Pinchot has also won six Audie Awards, including for Best Male Narrator for his rendering of Christopher Healy's The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw (2012).
Contents
Early life
Pinchot was born in New York City on May 20, 1959. He grew up with his mother, two brothers, and a sister. His mother, Rosina, was a typist and house cleaner, while his father, a bookbinder born in New York and raised in Paris, abandoned the family. This abandonment plunged the family into poverty. Pinchot's paternal grandparents were Russian immigrants who settled in France following the Russian Revolution. Upon returning to the United States, his father changed the family surname from Poncharavsky to Pinchot.
When Pinchot was two and a half years old, the family moved to South Pasadena, California. In school, he faced bullying and was often mocked for his appearance, being called "ugly" and "fat". Pinchot excelled academically, graduating at the top of his class from South Pasadena High School. His achievements earned him a full scholarship to Yale University, where he lived at Morse College. Although he initially planned to study fine arts, he ultimately majored in theater studies, graduating with honors. After college, a casting director discovered Pinchot, which led to his film debut in Risky Business.
Career
Pinchot appeared in several feature films, such as Hot Resort, Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, The First Wives Club, True Romance, Courage Under Fire, and It's My Party. He also played Dennis Kemper in the short-lived NBC sitcom Sara. Pinchot was hired to replace Fisher Stevens as Ben Jabituya in the 1986 film Short Circuit, but Pinchot eventually left the production in order to begin work on Perfect Strangers, and Stevens was subsequently rehired for the role.
Starting in 1986, Pinchot played Balki Bartokomous on the long-running ABC sitcom Perfect Strangers. When the show concluded filming its eight-season run in September 1992 (with the condensed final season airing during mid- 1993), Pinchot secured the starring role on a new sitcom for CBS, entitled The Trouble with Larry. The series premiered just three weeks after ABC's Perfect Strangers finale in August 1993, and one episode (which never aired) was directed by Mark Linn-Baker, Pinchot's co-star on Strangers. After three weeks of dismal ratings and poor reviews, The Trouble with Larry was canceled. Pinchot would subsequently be rehired by Perfect Strangers producers Tom Miller and Bob Boyett for roles on two more of their sitcoms: Step By Step where he played French hairdresser Jean-Luc Rieupeyroux in early 1997, and late the same year in Meego where he played an alien who crash-landed on Earth.
In 2008, Pinchot read the audio version of The Learners, author Chip Kidd's followup to The Cheese Monkeys. He also voiced Max, the fully restored Black 1964 VW Beetle, in the 2009 Volkswagen "Das Auto" campaign. Between 2009 and 2014, Pinchot narrated over 100 audiobooks. In 2010, Pinchot read the audio version of the novels Matterhorn and Blood Oath. For the Blackstone Audio collection Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, he provided a reading of several stories, including Strangers on a Train. Pinchot also narrated for Christopher Healy's children's series, The Hero's Guide. He was recognized for his work with a number of awards, including Audible.com's 2010 Narrator of the Year.
On February 12, 2012, Pinchot starred in a home restoration show on DIY Network titled The Bronson Pinchot Project. The program was based on his hobby of restoring old homes using salvaged materials. On March 8, 2018, it was announced that Pinchot would play George Hawthorne, the villainous, puritanical principal of Baxter High, who regularly clashes with Sabrina Spellman and her friends in the Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The series premiered in October 2018.
