---
name: "Justin Bartha"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/justin-bartha"
roles: ["Actor"]
born: "21 July 1978"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-16T14:49:18.066470+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."
---

# Justin Bartha

Actor. Born 21 July 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA.

## Details

- **Work:** Actor
- **Born:** 21 July 1978, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA
- **Also known as:** Justin Lee Bartha, جاستین بارتا

## Fi1m on Justin Bartha

> Justin Bartha is a likeable ensemble actor with reliable comic timing. We value him as a straight man, though *Gigli* shows how badly a supporting performance can suffer when the writing turns crude.

Brian in *Gigli* (2003) is asked to bear an awkward amount of the film’s comedy and tenderness. Justin Bartha plays him in a kidnapping story whose jokes about disability make its appeals for sympathy difficult to accept. We winced, because the humour encouraged us to laugh at the person the film wanted us to care about. Martin Brest gives his characters plenty to say about other people without showing much understanding of them, and Bartha is left working with that failure.

We would be wary of treating Brian as a fair demonstration of what Bartha can do. There are capable actors and a few surviving comic moments in *Gigli*, but neither makes the writing around his character less crude. Nor should sympathy for an actor stranded in a bad part turn into praise for the performance: the attempted tenderness remains hard to accept. His work here needs a director who has thought more carefully about whom the audience is being invited to laugh at.

*National Treasure* (2004) gave him a more suitable job as Riley Poole, the tech-savvy, sarcastic supporting character who became his breakthrough. Bartha’s reliable timing and likeable, ordinary presence suit the straight man’s task of giving an ensemble someone comparatively sensible. The danger is that being useful in this way can become the whole job, with little space left for anything else. His return to Riley in 2007 and his role as Doug Billings across *The Hangover* trilogy (2009–2013) helped establish a career largely defined by supporting parts.

That is not all he has attempted. *Holy Rollers* (2010) took him into independent drama, while *White Girl* (2016) brought darker character work; television included Colin Morrello in *The Good Fight* (2017). Those parts are reason enough to resist reducing him to the dependable comic companion, though they do not by themselves settle what he does best. Start with *National Treasure* for the timing, and leave *Gigli* out of any introduction.

## Biography

Justin Bartha is an American actor. He was born on 21 July 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and studied filmmaking and theatre at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

Bartha's early film roles include an uncredited part in *54* (1998) and the character Brian in *Gigli* (2003). He is known for playing Riley Poole in the *National Treasure* films (2004 and 2007) and Doug Billings in the *Hangover* trilogy (2009–2013). His other credits include *Failure to Launch* (2006), *The Rebound* (2009) and television appearances in *The New Normal*, *The Good Fight*, *Atlanta* and *Godfather of Harlem*.

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Gigli* (2003), Fi1m 32, as Brian — [page](https://film.one/film/gigli.md)

## Also known for

- *The Hangover* (2009), Doug Billings
- *The Hangover Part II* (2011), Doug Billings
- *The Hangover Part III* (2013), Doug Billings
- *National Treasure* (2004), Riley Poole
- *National Treasure: Book of Secrets* (2007), Riley Poole
- *Failure to Launch* (2006), Ace
- *Sweet Girl* (2021), Simon Keeley
- *The Rebound* (2009), Aram Finklestein

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© 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/justin-bartha