• Uncle is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan

• Education: Austin High, graduated 1997; University of Virginia, bachelor’s degree 2001

• His paternal grandparents both did some acting when they were young. His 22-year-old brother Nate is a Yale graduate working in avant-garde theater in New York. Younger brother Zack, 19, is attending Pomona College, a half-hour away from Los Angeles, and still pondering his future.

• He followed his father and grandfather to the University of Virginia, where he graduated in 2001 with a degree in economics and foreign relations.

• Moved to New York City three weeks before 9/11 and was there for the terrorist attacks.

• He worked as a waiter in the city until he got his acting break.

• He changed his name for screen-credit purposes because there’s an actor named Ben Schenkman registered with the Screen Actors Guild.

• Son of Austin attorney Pieter Schenkkan and poet-writer Mary Frances Victory.

• Has a manager, publicist and lawyer on the payroll (he’s shopping for a new agent now that his career is taking off)

• He recently moved into a new apartment in Santa Monica and bought a sleek new Infiniti G35, which he concedes he spends more on than housing.

• While in New York he waited tables to help support himself and shared a bunk bed in a cramped apartment in the city.

• Mother: Frances Schenkkan will begin the master’s program in creative writing at the University of Texas in the fall. She’s been a newspaper reporter and editor, and in the 1980s she served on the Austin Planning Commission and the board of the Austin Child Guidance Center. She is a recipient of the Adele Steiner Burleson prize in poetry at the university. She and husband Pieter have three sons, Ben, Nate, and Zack.

• He graduated from the same high school in Austin that the Bush twins (Jenna and Barbara) graduated from. He was a senior the year they were freshmen.

• Second cousin of Sarah Drew

• Was a speaker at the Democratic National Convention on July 27, 2004.

• Was voted one of InStyle’s “10 Hottest Bachelors Of Summer” in July 2005, placing at number 10.

• Ben was one of People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive, 2006. He is found in the “Sexy at every age, Age 28.”

• One of his grandfathers, Robert F. (“Bob”) Schenkkan, was an early proponent of both PBS and NPR. In recognition of his work, Austin, Texas’ public radio and television stations KUT-FM and KLRU-TV hosted a 90th birthday celebration for him in March 2007, at which McKenzie and many of Schenkkan’s other grandchildren spoke.

• Ben has volunteered with the Young Storytellers Program.