Brian Austin Green and the long afterlife of David Silver

Brian Austin Green

Photo: Andywallxyz / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 15, 1973 Van Nuys, Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Beautiful Disaster, Domino, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
Awards	2 Young Artist · Palm Beach International Film Festival Special Jury Prize

This autumn Brian Austin Green is doing two jobs that would have sounded like a punchline to the teenager who played David Silver. On HGTV he is tearing the décor out of a house stuck in the decade that made him famous, teamed with Beverley Mitchell and Jodie Sweetin in a competition sold on the audience’s memory of their faces. In a handful of cinemas, and soon on demand, he plays a sheriff in a blood-soaked creature feature he helped produce. Both jobs spend the same currency. The question his career has been asking since the end of the last century is whether that currency belongs to him or to the character.

The overlap was designed in. Aaron Spelling said he cast Green as David, the eager younger kid trying to keep up with the older crowd at West Beverly High, because the two had similar personalities, and the writers kept handing the character the actor’s own enthusiasms. When Green got into hip-hop and started DJing, so did David. For a decade, viewers watched a young man grow up inside a role partly drawn from his own life, which is a gift for a performer and also a fence.

He was already a working actor by then. The middle name came early: Brian Green, a Van Nuys kid from Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, born on July 15, 1973, needed it as a child so the Screen Actors Guild could tell him apart from another member. From 1986 to 1989 he played Brian Cunningham, the son of Donna Mills’s Abby, on the CBS soap Knots Landing, and won a Young Artist Award in 1989 for the television pilot of Adventures in Babysitting.

Beverly Hills, 90210 premiered on Fox in October 1990 and ran until May 2000, and Green stayed through the whole run. The part brought a second Young Artist Award in 1992 and shaped his private life too: he dated his co-star Tiffani Thiessen from 1992 to 1995 and later the actress Vanessa Marcil, with whom he had his first son, Kassius, in 2002. In 1996 he tried to prove the DJ was more than a character note, releasing a rap album, One Stop Carnival, produced by Slimkid3 of The Pharcyde. It left little trace. A quieter bet did better: in 2003 he directed an independent feature, Fish Without a Bicycle, which won a special jury prize at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.

The strongest case for Green as an actor came from genre television. In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which Fox launched in January 2008, he played Derek Reese, a Resistance fighter sent back from the future and the uncle John Connor never knew he had. Good notices turned a recurring role into a regular one in season two; Derek was killed in the penultimate episode, and Fox cancelled the show in 2009. He then played the villain Metallo in the ninth season of Smallville, and spent the first half of a 2010 season of Desperate Housewives as Keith Watson, the contractor who falls for Bree. TBS then made him the frontman of a cover act in Wedding Band, cancelled after one season in January 2013, and he went from guest to series regular on Anger Management as Sean, the boyfriend of Charlie’s ex-wife.

For much of that decade, though, the coverage was not about Derek Reese. Green met Megan Fox on the set of Hope & Faith when he was 30 and she was 18, married her in Hawaii in June 2010, and had three sons with her, born in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Tabloid shorthand turned him into her husband; the separation in May 2020 and the divorce finalized in February 2022 drew the same glare. His own account has since become harder to file. In July, on the I Do, Part 2 podcast, he said that across almost ten years of marriage he had “led with physical attraction”. In August, on the Really Famous podcast, he described an illness from the same years that was never fully diagnosed: stroke-like symptoms he attributes to internal inflammation, diet and emotional stress. “I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write,” he said. “My brain and my body completely disconnected.” Recovery took about four and a half years, by his count, and he had to learn to walk and talk again. The public version of that decade had room for a celebrity marriage. It had none for a man relearning how to speak.

The other critique concerns the work. Since the late 2010s his most visible jobs have been variations on the man audiences already know. BH90210 reunited the original cast in 2019 playing heightened versions of themselves and lasted a single season. He finished thirteenth on Dancing with the Stars in 2021, partnered with Sharna Burgess, the Australian professional dancer he had been dating since the previous autumn. The podcasts, first …With Brian Austin Green and since 2023 Oldish for iHeart, co-hosted with Burgess and Randy Spelling, the son of the producer who cast him as David, turned reminiscence into a format. It is steady work. It also means the actor who carried Derek Reese is rarely hired to be anyone other than a version of himself.

The current slate pushes against that, cautiously. The 3 Killer Pigs, Thomas J. Churchill’s homage to Dario Argento, opened in a limited US theatrical run on September 25 and reaches video on demand through Quiver Distribution on October 23. Green plays Sheriff Karloff and produced the film with Anson Williams of Happy Days; the cast includes Robert Carradine, who died in February, in one of his final roles, and Burgess in her first feature. He played a counterfeiter named Frank in Nick Leisure’s thriller Golden, which he also executive produced, and this year Bob Gold in Ben Peyser’s industry horror satire Hollywood Hells. In the romantic comedy Perfectly Imperfect he is Reuben, childhood friend to Dermot Mulroney’s hero. Totally ’90s House, the HGTV competition hosted by Jaleel White, premiered on August 26 and runs six episodes, with Green’s team facing Melissa Joan Hart, Keshia Knight Pulliam and Matthew Lawrence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEh_xNzfBDA

Green and Burgess had a son, Zane, in June 2022, making five boys in all, and announced their engagement in September 2023. In July, when a trip to Ireland set off talk of a wedding, Burgess answered plainly: “We have not yet booked a location for our wedding.”

The project that may say most about what comes next is still in the edit. Abominable, a psychological horror film Green has described shooting with a crew of eighteen in a village in the mountains north of Barcelona, is in post-production. Nobody in it is called David Silver, and nobody in the audience will be watching for him.

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Tags: actors, Brian Austin Green, megan fox, The 3 Killer Pigs, Beverly Hills, 90210, Sharna Burgess

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