Person Biography:
Carl Palmer was born in Austin, Texas, and was put up for adoption at birth. A month later, he was adopted by Pat and Barbara Palmer of Houston, Texas, and the family soon moved to Norco, Louisiana, a factory town twenty miles outside of New Orleans. He has a sister, Patty, and attended Catholic school for twelve years.
After graduating from high school, Palmer majored in History and Political Science at Louisiana State University, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. Initially, he planned to attend law school and pursue a career in politics and law, but took an acting class his last semester, which sparked his interest in acting. He then entered LSU's Theatre program and later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts.
Palmer spent the next twenty years living primarily in New York or Los Angeles, accumulating over sixty Off-Broadway and major regional credits, playing a wide range of roles from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Bottom to John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Bob Ewell in To Kill A Mockingbird. He also appeared in various films and TV shows, including The Pelican Brief opposite Julia Roberts.
In 2011, Palmer moved to New Orleans, where he continued to build his film and TV credits, including roles in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Dallas Buyers Club, Just Mercy, Fear the Walking Dead, and recurring roles on Bloodline and Filthy Rich.
Despite his busy career, Palmer still returns to the stage, with recent performances in the Public Theatre and Audible's Off-Broadway re-mounting of Coal Country and Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Palmer's personal life has also been marked by his search for his biological parents, which he wrote and performed about in his one-man-show, The Nature of a Fool, in the Nineties. He has since revamped and re-worked the play, now titled A Loss for Words, which delves deeper into his birth parents' love story as revealed through their actual love letters and what happened after the search.
Today, Palmer makes his primary home in Manhattan.
