Johnny Hickey is an actor and filmmaker from Boston, Massachusetts. His films are violent, real, and gritty, portraying America’s drug epidemic from various dark perspectives.
A one-time street bandit from Charlestown, these days Johnny is a celebrated filmmaker, actor, and anti-drug crusader. Early on in his career, he was a field producer for Vanguard correspondent Mariana Van Zeller on "The Oxycontin Express," a Current TV special which took home a Peabody Award for its investigation of opiate subculture in Boston. Hickey knew that world extremely well, and has used it as a centerpiece in much of his work up to this point.
Johnny’s feature-length debut, the 2013 opioid tragedy Oxy Morons, had a successful two-month test screening at Showcase Cinemas in New England, where it placed second in the theater's box-office sales in its first week of showing against more than a dozen studio films. The movie subsequently had a successful eighteen-month run on Netflix, getting more than 200,000 views, and is currently available on Amazon Prime, Xfinity On Demand, and Comcast Cable TV, reaching more than 30 million people nationwide.
Following Oxy Morons, Johnny directed fight choreography for the 2018 MMA action film Blood Circus, which he also helped produce and starred in. With his partners from Sugar Studios in Los Angeles, he recently completed his second feature film, the subterranean rave thriller Habitual, which stars longtime MTV favorite Chris "CT" Tamburello. Johnny is also in pre-production with VFX Executive Producer Scott Michelson for his next project, Shopper, written by Greg Meadows.
When he’s not creating films for the big screen, Johnny also directs web and television commercials and collaborates with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism on his Film Intervening Getting High Team (F.I.G.H.T.) project, which produces videos about the opioid crisis with people in recovery as well as media makers whose friends and family members struggle with addiction.