Mark Sheppard

Prior to his role as the King of Hell Crowley on Supernatural, Mark Sheppard already had an extensive career, spanning stage and screen since the early ’90s.

His last appearance as Crowley was in the 2017 episode, “All Along the Watchtower,” which brought to a close Season 12 of the Jensen Ackles and Jared Padelecki series. After that, Sheppard has been relatively quiet. 

Let’s take a look at the career of Mark Sheppard and what exactly he’s been up to since Supernatural.

MARK SHEPPARD IS ON INSTAGRAM

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A post shared by Mark Sheppard (@realmarksheppard)

Mark Sheppard might have slowed down some on the acting front, but he does still keep a fairly active social media presence. And along with that, he has more than 1.6 million Instagram followers.

One of his latest posts is about his sobriety, going on 33 years now according to the actor. He has also posted about his personal life as well.

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#Repost @slsheppard ・・・ Stealing a quick moment. Moments like this can mean a lot to us. Lives are busy & stressful & we have 3 kids! But also there can be a moment, usually in the morning, when I have a bit of energy & am not in too much pain yet. Being the partner of someone who suffers chronic pain and/or illness is incredibly tough and demanding. It shifts the balance in a relationship from an equal partnership to what can feel like a patient/carer. The ‘carer’ can feel overwhelmed & resentful and quite often, relationships don’t survive this. Fortunately I have an incredible husband who takes it in his stride but that doesn’t mean there aren’t difficulties & low moments in our marriage. Discovering, and then becoming an advocate for @invisiblewavemovement has helped me by having an online community to reach out too to discuss my fears, concerns & goals of my chronic illness. Not having to ‘dump’ it all on my partner. Being part of Invisible Wave is an honour as I want to be part of the change in healthcare policy & awareness. I want to be more than just ‘a sick person’ or even, as can be my case, ‘Marks wife’ or worse ‘Marks sick wife!!’ I am excited to be part of a movement that means the world to me; and, like I am lucky enough to have in every other part of my life, I know I have my partners full support. #invisiblewave #chronicillness #chronicpain #invisibleillness #changinghealthcare #support #supportivehusband #thankyou

A post shared by Mark Sheppard (@realmarksheppard) on Jul 29, 2020 at 12:10pm PDT

There are still acting gigs for Mark Sheppard, which we’ll get to. But he’s had quite an interesting career leading up to this point.

BEFORE ACTING, MARK SHEPPARD WAS IN A BAND

Mark Sheppard began his career in entertainment at the age of 17 in 1977. He formed the band Television Personalities, of which Sheppard was the drummer. Sheppard would become a session musician, working with Robyn Hitchcock, Hanoi Rocks, and Light a Big Fire.

While working with Light a Big Fire, Mark Sheppard would open for U2’s Joshua Tree tour. After that, Sheppard would audition for such bands as the Sex Pistols and Guns N’ Roses, but soon after, Sheppard would quit music. 

HE BEGAN ON THE STAGE AND TRANSITIONED TO TELEVISION

Mark Sheppard almost immediately found success in the acting world, debuting in an American production of the play Cock and Bull Story in 1992. The play, directed by Billy Hayes, writer of the book Midnight Express, is about an amateur boxer named Travis who discovers that he may be gay, which disturbs his homophobic friend, Jacko.

Sheppard played Jacko to great acclaim, a performance which earned him the LA Weekly and Dramalogue awards, as well as the 1992 L.A. Drama Critics’ Circle award.

Sheppard’s first credited TV work was for a recurring role on Silk Stalkings in 1992. Mark Sheppard would also appear on The X-Files in the 1993 episode, “Fire,” before joining the series Soldiers of Fortune, Inc. in 1997, as Christopher ‘C.J.’ Yates. 

In the 2000s, Sheppard would work on a number of prolific shows, appearing on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Firefly, and Monk. In 2006, Mark Sheppard played Ivan Erwich on the fifth season of 24.

In the lead up to joining the cast of Supernatural, Mark Sheppard appeared in larger roles on shows like Medium, Battlestar Galactica as Romo Lampkin, Dollhouse, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Doctor Who, as well as significant roles in Leverage, White Collar and Warehouse 13. 

MARK SHEPPARD WAS ALSO ON THE BIG SCREEN

In 1993, Mark Sheppard’s film career started off strong, appearing in the Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson-starring movie In the Name of the Father, which received seven Oscar nominations.

Unfortunately, that’s arguably the most popular film of Mark Sheppard’s career, although he has appeared in the 2004 Wesley Snipes film, Unstoppable, the 2006 Heather Graham-starring Broken, and in the horror film, Megalodon. Sheppard’s most recent film role was in the 2013 movie, Sons of Liberty. 

MARK SHEPPARD’S FATHER IS W. MORGAN SHEPPARD AND THE TWO HAVE ACTED TOGETHER

As the son of actor W. Morgan Sheppard, Mark was able to act alongside his father quite often before his death in 2019. On three different occasions, Mark and his father played the same character at different ages. In the Doctor Who episode “The Impossible Astronaut,” they both played Canton Everett Delaware III.

On NCIS, father and son played war criminal Marcin Jarek. and in the 2010 film, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island – which was also directed by Mark – both played Captain Nemo.

In the 2009 video game, The Conduit, Mark Sheppard voiced Agent Michael Ford, a Secret Service agent who saves the president from an assassination attempt and is brought into a group known as the Trust. The commander of the Trust, commander John Adams, was voiced by W. Morgan Sheppard as well. 

Mark would also direct his father in the film Room 101 and would act alongside his father in the thriller Nether World. 

In 2017, Mark Sheppard appeared in the MacGyver reboot in the episode “Cigar Cutter.” In the original version of the show, W. Morgan Sheppard had played a character named Dr. Zito. In the reboot, Mark Sheppard played a killer who took the name of a murder victim, also named Dr. Zito.

MARK SHEPPARD WAS CROWLEY ON SUPERNATURAL

Mark Sheppard would join Supernatural in 2009 for the episode, “Abandon All Hope” and would appear on 70 episodes, concluding his run on the show in 2017’s “All Along the Watchtower.”

In the Season 12 finale, Mark’s character Crowley sacrificed himself to help Sam and Dean Winchester win a battle with Lucifer. But despite the show’s penchant for bringing characters back from the dead, Mark Sheppard didn’t return to Supernatural for its fifteenth and final season. 

In a panel for Syfy, Mark Sheppard discussed his frustrations with getting cut from the show. “Once they decided they needed to do something different [with the direction of the show], they tried to get rid of me without telling me that they were going to get rid of me. But it became so apparent…It wasn’t this big bombshell at the end.”

Mark Sheppard continued with his irritation over the last few seasons for the character, calling his death, “the slowest, most painful death I’ve ever seen. I’d gone from being the smartest character on the show to being the dumbest character on the show in two seasons. They ran out of what to do,” eventually saying that, “they tried to kill me off for two years!”

On Twitter, Supernatural producer Jim Michaels stated that Crowley might not be finished on the show, but Mark Sheppard quickly nipped that idea in the bud, stating that Michaels was misleading fans and that there were no plans for Crowley to return to the series. 

SHEPPARD HAS BEEN ON DOOM PATROL

Mark Sheppard has been relatively quiet in the years since leaving Supernatural. He’s a busy father with two children from his first marriage and a daughter, born in 2016, with his current wife Sarah Louise Fudge.

Though he has worked less since Supernatural, he did have a recurring role on the HBO Max series Doom Patrol. He has appeared in both seasons of the show so far as Willoughby Kipling. The character of Kipling was based on Richard E. Grant’s character from Withnail & I and Kipling was made as a substitute for the Vertigo Comics character, John Constantine. Kipling is an occult detective who is also a member of the Knights Templar.

Of course, fans of Supernatural have missed Crowley, but his role in Doom Patrol at least gave audiences more of the actor in a charming and weird role that will hopefully continue for years to come.