Per a statement provided to Deadline, Australian actor Julian McMahon passed away on Wednesday, July 2, following a private battle with cancer. He was 56 years old. Best known for his lead role on the plastic surgery drama Nip/Tuck (2003-2010), for which he earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Television Drama Series, McMahon was also familiar for playing Doctor Doom in 2005’s Fantastic Four movie, and its 2007 sequel Rise of the Silver Surfer, as well as the Magistrate/Jonah on Marvel’s Runaways.
McMahon was born in Sydney on July 27, 1968, to politician William McMahon, and socialite Sonia McMahon; his father was 60 at the time, while his mother was 35. William served as Australia’s Prime Minister from 1971 to 1972. McMahon went on to study law and economics at college, but a lack of interest in his studies led him to pursue modeling instead. He made his acting debut in 1989, a year after his father’s passing, and soon landed a main part on the soap Home and Away, which he continued to star in until 1991.
He crossed over to the United States, where he landed a succession of lead TV roles on Another World, Profiler, Charmed, and Nip/Tuck. Fantastic Four marked one of his first major film roles, and while its portrayal of Victor von Doom was heavily criticized for departing so heavily from the source material, it earned McMahon the honor of becoming the first actor to play the role on the big screen, after the first film incarnation, played by Joseph Culp in 1994, went unreleased along with the film he starred in.
In 2017, a decade after his last appearance as Doom, McMahon expressed interest in returning to the part, saying “[If] I could play him the way I always wanted to, as a sniveling, conniving, freaky guy, I would do that for sure. The character I most want to play is the character I’ve already played! [laughs] There’s so much there!” Before his death, he said he was excited about Robert Downey Jr. taking on the role in 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday, while reflecting on the reception to his movies, saying, “Was it a kid’s movie? Was it a family movie? Was it more comedy-driven, or was it more trauma-driven? We were trying to find all that stuff as we were shooting.”
After his time with the Fantastic Four franchise and Nip/Tuck, McMahon remained a prolific actor, playing the Vice President in the 2010 action comedy RED (based on the WildStorm comic of the same name), and the villainous Magistrate’s host body Jonah on the first two seasons of Runaways from 2017 to 2018. His prominent role in his later career was Jess LaCroix on FBI: Most Wanted, whom he also played on its sister shows from 2019 to 2022; he also guest starred on the American version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency in 2016. His final role was in Netflix’s 2025 murder mystery The Residence, where, in a full circle moment, he played the Prime Minister of Australia.
McMahon is survived by his third wife, author Kelly Paniagua; a daughter, Madison, from his second marriage; and two sisters. He was previously married to singer Dannii Minogue (Kylie‘s sister, whom he met on the set of Home and Away) from 1994 to 1995, and actress Brooke Burns from 2000 to 2001; he and Paniagua had been married since 2014.
