Alexander Ross Winter (born July 17, 1965) is a British-American actor and filmmaker. He played the slacker Bill 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 Marko in the 1987 vampire film The Lost Boys; for co-writing, co-directing, and starring in the 1993 film Freaked; and for directing documentaries in the 2010s. Early life Winter was born in London, England. His mother, Margaret "Gregg" Mayer, is a New York-born former Martha Graham dancer, who 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. Winter received training in dance as a child. He has an older brother named Stephen. His father has English ancestry and his mother is Jewish, of Ukrainian Jewish descent. When Winter was five, his family moved to Missouri, where his father ran the Mid-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 Montclair, New Jersey. During this time Winter began performing as an actor on and off Broadway, commuting into New York City. He reports his experience in New Jersey as being positive. In 1983, after graduating from Montclair High School, Winter was accepted into the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. While at NYU, he met fellow aspiring filmmaker Tom Stern. The two collaborated on a number of 16 mm short films and both graduated with honours. Career As an actor, Winter spent many years on Broadway with supporting roles in productions of The King and I, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, and the American premiere of Simon Gray's Close of Play at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Winter dropped out of NYU film school before his senior year, and he and Tom Stern moved out to Hollywood, where the two wrote and directed a number of short films and music videos. Winter continued to find work as an actor, landing notable roles in such big productions as The Lost Boys and Rosalie Goes Shopping. In 1989, Winter found international success when he co-starred with Keanu Reeves, playing Bill S. Preston in the