Why Harry From The Block Island Sound Looks So Familiar

The Block Island Sound, Netflix's latest dread-filled slow-burning horror exercise, is picking up some heat on the streaming service this week. The psychological horror-thriller film, from writer-director brothers Kevin and Michael McManus, is set on the titular tourist destination off the coast of Rhode Island. The title has a double meaning; it's both the body of water that separates Block Island from the mainland, and the ominous buzz that comes over boat radios in the part of the strait where the bad things are coming from.

The film follows a family of permanent island residents during an invasion of body-snatchers that occurs during the island's offseason. It starts with birds falling from the sky, followed by fish, which are washing up dead on the beach in huge numbers. Then the family patriarch, Tom (Neville Archambault), begins acting strangely, and goes missing from his boat. His daughter Audry (Michaela McManus, the directors' sister) thinks he fell overboard while drunk, but his son Harry (Chris Sheffield) suspects foul play. Harry is right, but it's not something he could have ever imagined.

Harry is played by Chris Sheffield, a blond Texan with a familiar face. Here are the shows and movies where you may have seen Sheffield before.

The most prominent role in the biggest movie of Sheffield's career so far was Ben in The Maze Runner, the first film in the young adult dystopian sci-fi franchise.

In the film, Ben is a runner who explores the maze, looking for a way out. One day in the maze, he attacks the protagonist, Thomas (Dylan O'Brien). When Ben is apprehended by other Gladers — the people who live in the Glade, the safe zone at the center of the maze — they discover that he's been stung by a Griever, a creature that lives in the maze and terrorizes Gladers in the maze after dark. If a person gets stung by a Griever, they go through a "Changing" which makes them uncontrollably aggressive. Ben is deemed incurable, and is banished from the Glade back into the maze, where he is killed by the Grievers.

In 2014, Sheffield told Hypable that he was the last actor cast in the film and the first to wrap. "After an all night shoot, we all got back to the hotel around 6:30 a.m. and [the other cast members] all stayed up to hang out with me until a car came to take me to the airport at 7:30 a.m.," Sheffield said. "As the car pulled away, they all mooned me and yelled to me!"

Sheffield had a recurring role throughout the run of the TNT post-apocalyptic action-drama series The Last Ship as naval communications officer Will Mason. Mason was one of the crew members on the U.S.S. Nathan James, the titular last ship whose sailors are among the only people to survive a deadly pandemic, and are tasked with trying to stop the virus and save humanity. His main jobs were to listen to radio distress signals from around the world in search of other survivors, and to monitor the radar for potential enemies.

"The character, Will Mason, represents a coming-of-age on the show and over the course of the season you see my character lose his innocence and grow into a man through his experiences on and off the ship," Sheffield told HuffPo.

He died early in season 3, when he was captured by pirates and drained of his blood by malign actors who were developing an anti-cure for the virus. He appeared one last time in a vision hallucinated by Admiral Tom Chandler (Eric Dane), the captain of the ship, in the series finale.

In 2015, Sheffield appeared in an underappreciated psychological thriller available on Netflix, The Stanford Prison Experiment, alongside a lot of other notable young actors including Ezra Miller, Michael Angarano, Tye Sheridan, Keir Gilchrist, and Nicholas Braun.

He played Tom Thompson a.k.a. Prisoner 2093 in the indie film, which was based on infamous true events. In 1971, the Stanford University psychology department did an experiment where students were made to play guards or prisoners in a simulated jail. The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks, but it was called off after only six days because the prisoners — and especially the guards — got too into their roles.

Tom Thompson was the quietist, most obedient prisoner, which made him hated by both other prisoners and the guards, who thought he was mocking them. He was living in his car at the time of the experiment, and Sheffield told The Mary Sue that he thought part of why Thompson behaved how he did came from the fact that he was just grateful to have a little bit of income and a place to sleep for a few days. "The obedience came out not only because that is just who he is naturally, but also because he was kind of enjoying being there," Thompson said. "There were a lot of layers to the character, which is why it was so fun to plug in."