He is known for his roles in various science fiction, action and horror genre productions, including Bishop in the Alien film franchise and Frank Black in the Fox television series Millennium (1996–99) and The X-Files (1999).

[1] He has also done extensive voice work, including the Disney film Tarzan (1999) and the video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy (2007–2012).

Other film credits include The Right Stuff (1983), The Terminator (1984), Hard Target (1993), Color of Night (1994), The Quick and the Dead (1995), Powder (1995), Scream 3 (2000), Appaloosa (2008), and Falling (2020).

His father, James Henriksen, was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer nicknamed "Icewater" who spent most of his life at sea, while his mother, Margueritte Werner, struggled to find work as a dance instructor, waitress and model.

[5][6] His parents divorced when he was two years old, and his mother struggled to raise him and his brother Walter, leading to his spending part of his childhood in foster care.

He auditioned for the role of Leon Shermer in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), but received the smaller part of an FBI agent that kills John Cazale's character.

He played Police Chief Steve Kimbrough in Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1982),[17] the astronaut Walter Schirra in The Right Stuff (1983), and actor Charles Bronson in the television film Reason for Living: The Jill Ireland Story (1991).

When James Cameron was writing The Terminator (1984), he originally envisioned Henriksen, with whom he had worked on Piranha II, as playing the title role, a cyborg.

Henriksen guest-starred on a Season 6 episode of NCIS (2009) playing an Arizona sheriff, and appeared in a recurring role as The Major on NBC's The Blacklist.

In 2009, Henriksen voiced Lieutenant General Shepherd in the award-winning game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Henriksen voiced Master Gnost-Dural in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and he also reprised his role as Admiral Hackett in Mass Effect 3.

He starred in a 2003 series of Australian television commercials for Visa, titled Unexplained (about the raining of fish from the sky[23] over Norfolk) and Big Cats (about the Beast of Bodmin Moor).

He made a cameo appearance in the 2009 horror comedy Jennifer's Body, and starred in the After Dark Horrorfest film, Scream of the Banshee, released in 2011.

The game's plot involves androids gaining sentience and free will, topics explored briefly with Henriksen's Bishop character in Aliens.

In October 2018, Henriksen was signed for one of the two leads in Falling, the directorial debut of actor Viggo Mortensen, who also wrote, produced and co-starred.

[28] Reviewing the film's 2020 premiere, The Hollywood Reporter's John DeFore noted not only the quality of Henriksen's performance, but the opportunity Mortensen's script presented: "[F]ew moviegoers who've enjoyed him over the years will be surprised, but many will resent that we, and he, have waited so long for a role like this.

It is directed by Justin Paul[32] and Dave Campfield and produced by Fourth Horizon Cinema, Impact Media Studios and Design Weapons.

[citation needed] Henriksen has five children; three with Pollack, one with Lunde, and a daughter, Monique, with Joan Bottinelli, born 1964.