--- name: "Danny Strong" canonical: "https://film.one/person/danny-strong" roles: ["Creator","Director","Writer"] born: "6 June 1974" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T04:01:32.414557+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Danny Strong Creator and director. Born 6 June 1974 in Manhattan Beach, California, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Creator, Director, Writer - **Born:** 6 June 1974, Manhattan Beach, California, USA - **Also known as:** دنی استرانگ ## Fi1m on Danny Strong > Danny Strong is a writer who directs, and it shows. His stories come from the public record, arrive from several directions at once and stop to make sure you have understood. When he trusts a face over a caption he is a good deal better. A caption says 1996. A few minutes later another says 2002, then 2005, then 1999. This is *Dopesick* (2021), Strong's eight-part account of how OxyContin took a Virginia mining town, and the captions tell you most of what you need to know about how he works. He has done the reading, he has the timeline, and he wants us to have it too. When the series sits still in the town, with Michael Keaton and Kaitlyn Dever, it is close to excellent. Then it cuts to Michael Stuhlbarg's Richard Sackler in a Connecticut boardroom, or to the prosecutors, to be sure the point has landed. It had. He began as an actor in the mid-1990s, with recurring parts in *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* and *Gilmore Girls*, and took up writing when the acting was not going well. "Writing was the thing that got my mind off my career issues," he has said, which is about as unromantic an origin as a screenwriter has offered. What he wrote were political dramas built from research: *Recount* (2008), on the Florida recount, and *Game Change* (2012), on the 2008 Palin campaign, both for HBO. Then *Lee Daniels' The Butler* (2013), written with Daniels, and the two *Mockingjay* films. He and Daniels went on to create *Empire* (2015–2020), where Strong directed episodes for the first time. His first feature as director, *Rebel in the Rye* (2017), a life of J.D. Salinger, went to Sundance and met mixed reviews. *Dopesick* is where the writer and the director meet, and the writer wins. He shares the direction with Barry Levinson, Michael Cuesta and Patricia Riggen and keeps the look consistent, Checco Varese shooting the town under flat grey skies and Purdue in cold glass and polished wood. But the architecture is his, and it is the architecture that tires: four strands, a decade of captions, Lorne Balfe's low strings pushed up whenever a point needs help. We will admit the town scenes got to us. Keaton and Dever, in rooms where nobody is explaining anything, made us angry in the way the series wanted, and it was the honest anger of watching people rather than reading a file. Then a caption, then a boardroom, and the anger cooled into a lesson. The ability is there, and so is the research. What is missing is the nerve to leave some of it out. Strong writes like a man who has done the work and wants credit for all of it. The next time he directs, we would like him to pick one of his four directions and follow it to the end, and let the other three stay in the notes. ## Biography Danny Strong is an American actor, screenwriter, director and producer. He began his career as an actor with roles including Jonathan Levinson in *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* (1997) and Doyle McMaster in *Gilmore Girls* (2000), as well as appearances in *Seinfeld*, *Pleasantville* (1998) and *Mad Men* (2007). Strong later focused on writing and directing. He wrote the screenplays for the HBO films *Recount* (2008) and *Game Change* (2012), *Lee Daniels' The Butler* (2013) and co-wrote *The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1* (2014) and *Part 2* (2015). He co-created the Fox series *Empire* (2015–2020) and created, wrote and directed the Hulu miniseries *Dopesick* (2021). He has received two Primetime Emmy Awards, two Writers Guild of America Awards, a Producers Guild of America Award and a NAACP Image Award. Strong grew up in Manhattan Beach, California, and studied at the University of Southern California. *Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org, deadline.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Dopesick* (2021), Fi1m 68, Creator, Director, Writer — [page](https://film.one/tv/dopesick.md) ## Also known for - *The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1* (2014), Screenplay - *The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2* (2015), Screenplay - *How I Met Your Mother* (2005), Trey Platt - *The Butler* (2013), Freedom Bus Journalist, Writer - *Pleasantville* (1998), Juke Box Boy - *Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping* (2016), Perspective Manipulator - *Dangerous Minds* (1995), Student - *Sydney White* (2007), Gurkin --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/danny-strong