Scott Grimes, the voice of Steve Smith who never stopped singing

Scott Grimes

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 9, 1971 Lowell, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Actor, voice actor and singer
Known for	Oppenheimer, Crimson Tide, Robin Hood

Plenty of television viewers know the voice before they can name the man behind it: the cracked, eager tenor of Steve Smith, the teenage son on American Dad!, which Scott Grimes has supplied for more than four hundred episodes. Put him on camera and the recognition jumps to other faces. There is the surgeon who wandered into the emergency department of ER as comic relief and stayed until the last shift, and the helmsman trading jokes at Seth MacFarlane’s elbow on The Orville. None of them accounts for the thing Grimes has never put down. He was a singer before he was any of those men, and the music has followed him through four decades of being the second name on the call sheet.

The family map is New England with a desert detour. Grimes started life in Lowell, Massachusetts, spent his first ten years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then moved back east to Dracut, where he went through the town’s public schools. Performing ran in the household. His sister, Heather Grimes, also became an actress, and his niece, Camryn Grimes, would later spend years on The Young and the Restless.

A birthday of July 9, 1971, put him at thirteen when he shared the screen with Mickey Rooney in the television Christmas film It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. Two years later he was fending off carnivorous alien furballs as Brad Brown in Critters, a role he repeated in the sequel, and he lent his voice to Pinocchio in the animated Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night. The singing was already working as hard as the acting. In March 1986 he performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on a Bob Hope special taped in Sweden before King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia. A year later Richard Carpenter brought the fifteen-year-old in as a guest vocalist on his album Time and wrote in the liner notes that he believed young Scott had “quite a future in music.” Carpenter then produced “I Don’t Even Mind”, the single from Grimes’s self-titled debut on A&M Records in 1989. It peaked at number 34 on the adult contemporary chart. The future Carpenter predicted did not arrive on his schedule.

Television filled the gap. Grimes played Will McCorkle on Party of Five, the Fox drama about five orphaned siblings in San Francisco, and turned up as a petty officer on the submarine in Crimson Tide. In 2001 came the part that still shows best what he can do when nobody asks him to be funny: Technical Sergeant Donald Malarkey of Easy Company in Band of Brothers, the HBO miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

He joined ER in 2003 as Dr. Archie Morris, a resident the writers first used to lighten the room. By the twelfth season Morris had been promoted to the main cast, and when NBC closed County General in 2009 he had become central to several of the final seasons’ storylines, a supporting player who was still on shift when the series signed off.

Two years into that stint, Grimes began voicing Steve on American Dad!, the animated sitcom MacFarlane created with Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman. The job turned MacFarlane’s productions into a professional home. Grimes went on to voice Kevin Swanson on Family Guy, and from 2017 to 2022 he played Gordon Malloy, helmsman and best friend of Captain Ed Mercer, played by MacFarlane himself, on The Orville. On the Peacock series Ted he is Matty Bennett, the loud Vietnam veteran father of young John, a veteran who battles post-traumatic stress and is tough on his kid. That is an unusual degree of loyalty in either direction.

The music never stopped. In 2005 he co-wrote and sang “Sunset Blvd”, which climbed to number 18 on Billboard’s adult contemporary chart, and released the album Livin’ on the Run; Drive followed in 2010. That same year he played Will Scarlet in Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood opposite Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett. Off camera, Grimes would become one of the four singers in Crowe’s band, Indoor Garden Party.

The arrangement has a cost, and it shows in the credits. In more than four decades of work Grimes has rarely been the name a project is sold on. His awards history is a run of Young Artist nominations and a Saturn Award nomination for Critters, all from his teenage years, with no wins. The music he keeps coming back to has lived on the adult contemporary chart and inside another man’s band. His best showcase on screen, The Orville, has been stranded since its third season: MacFarlane said this year that ten scripts for a fourth are written, yet no production has been scheduled. Ted ended after two seasons because it cost too much to make. Call it the economics of reliability. The industry pays the dependable second lead in steady work rather than headlines, and Grimes has never run short of work.

His private life has played out partly in public. He married Dawn Bailey-Grimes in 1997, and the couple had a son and a daughter. A second marriage, to Megan Moore in 2011, ended with her divorce filing in 2017. In May 2019 he married his Orville co-star Adrianne Palicki in Austin, Texas; she filed for divorce two months later, withdrew the petition that November, and filed again after the couple separated in 2020.

The work, meanwhile, has rarely been busier. American Dad! returned to Fox on February 22, 2026, after TBS cancelled it in March 2025, and its 22nd season, which included the show’s 400th episode, ran until September 13. Fox has renewed the series through the 2028–29 television season. The second season of Ted premiered on Peacock on March 5, 2026, with eight episodes, and MacFarlane confirmed that same month that there were no plans for a third, citing production costs. In September Grimes was in Venice with Alan Doyle, Carl Falk and Samantha Barks, the musical collaborators who joined Crowe for the premiere of What Love Builds, the documentary about the actor’s life in music and his band.

Steve Smith has a 23rd season already ordered at Fox. Whether Gordon Malloy ever takes the helm again depends on MacFarlane’s calendar. And the singer Richard Carpenter heard at fifteen is still performing, in Russell Crowe’s band rather than under his own name.

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Tags: actors, Russell Crowe, Band of Brothers, ER, Scott Grimes, American Dad!

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