Thomas F. Wilson

Person

Thomas Francis Wilson Jr., a.k.a. Thomas F. Wilson (born April 15, 1959; age 63), is a SpongeBob SquarePants cast member. He provides additional voices in the show, mainly villains, including Flats the Flounder in the episode "The Bully," the Tattletale Strangler in the episode "SpongeBob Meets the Strangler," and Reg the bouncer in "No Weenies Allowed." Wilson is best known for his role as Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future trilogy movies.

Biography

Wilson was born on April 15, 1959 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in nearby Wayne, Pennsylvania. While attending Radnor High School, he was involved in dramatic arts and was president of the debate team, where his partner was future New York Times columnist David Brooks; and played tuba in the high school band and was drum major of his marching band. He studied international politics at Arizona State University.

In 1981, Wilson moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career. He shared an apartment with fellow aspiring comedians Andrew Dice Clay and Yakov Smirnoff, and later joked that he "taught them both about America."

Wilson had a small role in the second season of NBC's Knight Rider in an episode titled "A Knight In Shining Armor."

His breakthrough role was the bully Biff Tannen in the 1985 film Back to the Future. He returned in the sequels Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III to not only reprise his role as Biff, but to also play Biff's grandson Griff Tannen and great-grandfather Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen. In every Back to the Future film, his character ends up in a pile of manure (in reality, a heap of mulches) after trying to kill or hurt Michael J. Fox's character Marty McFly. He reprised his role as Biff and voiced various Tannen relatives in the animated series. Wilson did not reprise his role as Biff in the initial versions of Telltale's Back to the Future: The Game released in 2011, being replaced by Kid Beyond. When the game was ported to the PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One in 2015 in commemoration of the original film's 30th anniversary, Wilson returned to provide Biff's voice in these newer versions.

In 1992, he voiced gangster Tony Zucco in Batman: The Animated Series and police detective Matt Bluestone in the animated series Gargoyles. He later went to co-star with Mark Hamill in the video game Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. It was the third chapter in the Wing Commander series, but the first to feature live action and was extremely popular at the time. The character played by Wilson was Major Todd "Maniac" Marshall, a fellow starfighter pilot to Hamill's character. Wilson also starred in the sequels Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (1995) and Wing Commander: Prophecy (1997) and contributed his voice to the animated series Wing Commander Academy (1996) in the same role. He also guest starred in an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in 1997.

Wilson played McKinley High School's Coach Ben Fredricks in the 1999–2000 NBC comedy drama Freaks and Geeks. Coach Fredricks dated Bill Haverchuck's mother. Wilson was briefly reunited with his Back to the Future co-star Christopher Lloyd in the 1994 film Camp Nowhere.

In 2005, he played Coach Phelps in the TV series Zoey 101. In 2009, he released his very first stand-up comedy special and second comedy album, Tom Wilson: Bigger Than You.

He hosted a podcast, Big Pop Fun, on the Nerdist Network from 2011 to 2014. The podcast featured Tom sharing stories of his career, as well as informal chats with show business friends including Samm Levine, Blake Clark, Steve Oedekerk, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Wilson currently maintains a YouTube channel, where he regularly vlogs. As of May 2022, his channel has over 35,000 subscribers.