Jake Picking (born 1990 or 1991^[1]) is an American actor. He is best known for portrayingRock Hudson in theNetflix seriesHollywood (2020), created byRyan Murphy.^[2] He is also known for playing the role ofSean Collier inPatriots Day (2016), and appearing inTop Gun: Maverick (2022).^[3][4][5] In 2022, he starred as youngGerald Ford in theShowtime seriesThe First Lady.

Jake Picking was born inErlangen, Germany, where his father, a United States Army soldier andWest Point graduate, was stationed. He grew up inWellesley,Massachusetts.^[6] AtNew York University, Picking was a winger on the New York ice hockey team.^[7] He dropped out of business school after a year because he was more interested in acting and student film projects.^[8] As an ice hockey player, Picking appeared in anNHL commercial before his acting career.^[7]

Picking's high school math teacher encouraged him to try out acting, and he took lessons with Carolyn Pickman, a casting agent who also representedBen Affleck andMatt Damon.

Picking finally began attending auditions in Boston,^[6] in 2013 he made his feature film debut with a role in the youth filmThe Way, Way Back withSteve Carell. This was followed by guest appearances in the seriesIronside (2013) andChasing Life (2014). To start a professional acting career, he moved to Los Angeles, where he initially studied old Hollywood films with stars such as James Dean, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift in his one-room apartment out of loneliness. He preferred moving to the West Coast to a possible acting course at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, although he had no contacts whatsoever in Los Angeles.^[8]

In the next years Picking was regularly in movie productions but mostly subscribed to support roles. In 2016, he was part of the ensemble of the dramaGoat,^[9] which deals with physical and psychological violence in the American college fraternity landscape. In the role of the sadistic oath master Dixon, Picking tormented Brett, played byNick Jonas. In the same year he appeared in the thrillerPatriots Day,^[4] which dramatizes the attack on the Boston Marathon. Here he played the part of policemanSean Collier, who is shot by the bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (played byAlex Wolff and Themo Melikidze).

In 2022, Picking appeared in theTop Gun sequelTop Gun: Maverick as Lt. Brigham "Harvard" Lennox.^[8]

• Jake Picking atIMDb
• Jake Picking onInstagram

• 1990s births
• Living people
• American male film actors
• American male television actors
• American people of German descent
• People from Erlangen

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from July 2024
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• Year of birth missing (living people)