Paul Monte Jr.

American actor Paul Monte Jr.'s exposure to show business began in his toddler years with daily viewings of the daytime game shows Card Sharks and The Price Is Right in the late 1970s. Enamored with the show's production value and excitement, he knew he had to find a way of getting inside the TV screen. Paul eventually participated in religious holiday productions at his grade school in his hometown of Bristol, Pennsylvania and even spent that time as an altar boy for Saint Mark's Church in Bristol - equating the servicing of mass to a performance. Remarkably, the acting bug didn't strike Paul again until college, where he practically lived at The Red Cloud Coffee House theater on the campus of Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s. In addition to performing in several student-written and classic productions, including Cabaret, he signed up for every acting, writing, and producing class the college offered. The real world struck Paul upon graduation from Cabrini in 1998. Unable to find work in video production or a theater, he took a position designing newspaper pages for his hometown publication, The Bucks County Courier Times. A year later, he landed a position with electronic retailer QVC in West Chester, Pennsylvania in their internal communication department and eventually their in-house ad agency as a graphic designer and art director. Ten years into his QVC career, Paul began taking acting classes in Philadelphia with casting director Mike Lemon, leading to further training at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre and workshops in New York City, including one with actor-director Chazz Palminteri. After a series of local commercial bookings in and around the Philadelphia area, Paul's epiphany came in the summer of 2009 when he was cast and eventually upgraded on the set of the movie How Do You Know (2010), directed by James L. Brooks. An impromptu exchange with actor Domenick Lombardozzi during a take allowed Paul his first principal role as a "Drunk Teammate." Elated by the experience, and no longer willing to burn the candle at both ends between his desk job and acting, Paul left QVC in 2010 to pursue acting full time. Today Paul is known notably as District Attorney Mark Franklin in the fourth and final season of the Cinemax series Banshee (2013). He is also credited as a Rothschild Broker in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), directed by Martin Scorsese and appears in Chris Evans (Captain America: Civil War (2016)) directorial debut Before We Go (2014).