Alexander Ross Winter (born 17 July 1965) is a British-American actor and filmmaker. As an actor, he is best known for playing Bill S. Preston, Esq., in the 1989 film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequels Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). He is also known for his role as Vladimir in the 2026 Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, and for playing Marko in the 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys.
As a filmmaker, Winter is known for his documentaries, including Zappa (2020) and Deep Web (2015), for directing the feature film, Adulthood (2025), and co-writing, co-directing, and starring in the 1993 surrealist comedy film Freaked. He has also directed numerous television shows and co-created sketch comedy series The Idiot Box (1991).
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Early life
Winter was born in London on 17 July 1965. His mother, Gregg Mayer, is a New York-born dancer who trained with Martha Graham, and founded a modern-dance company in London in the mid-1960s. His father, Ross Albert Winter, is an Australian who danced with Winter's mother's troupe and co-founded the Mid American Dance Company in St. Louis. His father has English ancestry and his mother is Jewish, of Ukrainian Jewish descent. His family wasn’t observant with their Judaism although he went to Jewish summer camp and learned Yiddish through his grandmother.
Winter received training in dance as a child. When he was five, his family moved to Missouri, where his father ran the Mid-American Dance Company (later, Modern American Dance Company), while his mother taught dance at Washington University in St. Louis. The two divorced in 1973.
In 1978, Winter moved to the New York City area, where he and his mother lived in the city and in Montclair, New Jersey. During this time Winter began performing as an actor on and off Broadway, commuting into New York City.
In 1983, after graduating from Montclair High School, Winter was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he majored in film and minored in photography. While at NYU, he met fellow aspiring filmmaker Tom Stern. The two collaborated on a number of 16 mm short films.
Career
Acting & directing
Winter began acting professionally at ten years old and spent his teen years on Broadway with supporting roles in productions of The King and I, with Yul Brynner, Peter Pan, with Sandy Duncan, and the American premiere of Simon Gray's Close of Play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Lynne Meadow.
Winter made his feature film acting debut in the 1985 film Death Wish 3, while still a film student at NYU. He dropped out of film school before his senior year in order to accept a role in the film, The Lost Boys (1987). Winter moved to Hollywood, where he began to write and direct a number of short films and music videos. He continued to find work as an actor, with notable roles in such productions as Ivan Passer's Haunted Summer and Percy Adlon's Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989).
In 1989, Winter found international success when he co-starred with Keanu Reeves, playing William "Bill" S. Preston Esq. in the comedy Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a role he reprised in its 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey.
Following the success of Bill & Ted, Winter and creative collaborators Tom Stern and Tim Burns were hired to develop a sketch comedy show for MTV. The result, 1991's The Idiot Box, was a hit for the network in its first season. Winter, Stern and Burns declined an offer to make a second season of the Idiot Box and instead accepted a $12 million deal from 20th Century Fox with Winter and Stern jointly making their feature film directorial debut and Winter starring in the 1993 comedy, Freaked. The film was never widely released, despite positive reviews from The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. It has since become a cult favorite, with a global re-release in 2025, with the Idiot Box being re-released at the same time.
Winter spent the next several years in London, directing award-winning TV commercials and music videos. He returned to feature films in 1999, when he wrote and directed the psychological thriller Fever which starred Henry Thomas in the lead role. The film was shown at film festivals worldwide, including Official Selection in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes. The New York Daily News called the film "a claustrophobic mind bender. Winter sustains an aura of creepiness worthy of Roman Polanski." In the New York Times, AO Scott praised the film as "Pure Hitchcockian panic. An arresting example of what a talented filmmaker can accomplish with the sparest of means."
Personal life
Winter was married to Sonya Dawson, with whom he had a son, born in 1998. The couple later divorced. In 2010, he married Ramsey Ann Naito. They have two children.
Winter maintains dual British and American citizenship.
In 2018, Winter revealed that he suffered "intense and prolonged" child sexual abuse at the hands of an older man while acting on Broadway as a child. Winter has said that he experienced PTSD due to the abuse, saying, "I had extreme PTSD for many, many years."
Politics and activism
Technology and piracy
Winter began devoting a lot of his attention to online communities in the 1980s. Winter liked the idea of large numbers of anonymous users discussing a variety of topics in an anonymous space. "I found that really striking then. And it seemed liked the beginning of something." He has criticized media companies and news outlets for exaggerating how many people used Napster for digital piracy.
Winter's interest in technology, the Internet and privacy inspired him to make his celebrated documentaries about the rise of global movements online. In 2015, Winter gave a popular TED talk about the need for greater privacy and security in the digital age, in the face of powerful tech companies.
Activism against Elon Musk
In response to Elon Musk's activities with the Department of Government Efficiency, in February 2025, Winter helped initiate the Tesla Takedown movement, a peaceful protest held outside Tesla showrooms worldwide. He has stated that the intention was to be anti-Elon Musk and not Tesla. Winter, an avid electric-vehicle owner, called Musk a “toxic figurehead” for the company and set a goal with the protests to help educate people about Musk's nefarious activities and motivate the general public to protest.
Palestine
In October 2023, Winter signed an open letter by Artists4Ceasefire that called for a ceasefire in the Gaza war. In April 2024, Winter signed an open letter in support of Jonathan Glazer's Oscar speech for The Zone of Interest, in which he criticized the dehumanization of victims of the ongoing Gaza genocide.
In June 2025, Winter read out a letter by Mahmoud Khalil, an activist detained for his support of Palestinian rights, after he was released from custody. That September, Winter signed an open pledge with Film Workers for Palestine pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions "that are implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people."
