Roy Cockrum
Roy Cockrum (born 1955 or 1956) is an American lottery winner, philanthropist, former actor, and Episcopal monk in training. He started the Roy Cockrum Foundation to support professional theater in the United States.
Cockrum grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and studied theater at Northwestern University, graduating in 1978. He apprenticed at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival and Actors Theater of Louisville, and spent 21 years acting in Chicago and New York. He appeared in commercials and in the off-Broadway show Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, playing two supporting roles, while also working as a server, proofreader, and hand model.
After the September 11 attacks, he left theater and became a postulant in the Episcopal Society of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2004, after seeing the stage adaptation of His Dark Materials in London, he decided not to take the vows and moved back to Knoxville to care for his parents.
In 2014 he won a $259 million Powerball jackpot, taking a $153.5 million lump sum. He used about $60 million of the winnings to form the Roy Cockrum Foundation, which funds nonprofit theater across the United States. While Cockrum personally supported causes like Doctors Without Borders and the Knoxville Symphony, the Foundation focuses only on theater.
The Foundation aims to fund large, ambitious productions. One example was Henry 6 at The Old Globe, a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays with 32 performers that received $1.8 million in support. The first projects it supported included a five-hour adaptation of the novel 2666 at the Goodman Theatre and a production of Mary Page Marlowe at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. The Foundation also provided $1.2 million to support apprentices at the Actors Theater of Louisville.
In 2016, Cockrum produced The Glory of the World by Charles Mee, about the monk Thomas Merton, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:53 (CET).