This stage-trained actor won a Theatre World Award in 1989 for his Off-Broadway debut in Paul Zindel's "Amulets Against the Dragon Forces". Loren Dean made his film debut in Martha Coolidge's teen comedy "Plain Clothes" (1988) and played a spaced-out West Coast high schooler in "Say Anything" (1989). He went on to land the title role in Robert Benton's film adaptation of E L Doctorow's "Billy Bathgate" (1991), playing the 15-year-old flunky and protege of legendary gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman). The film's mixed critical and audience reception stalled the rising actor's career, although he has gone on to offer strong supporting turns in a handful of features. In Jocelyn Moorhouse's "How To Make an American Quilt" (1995), he was in the flashbacks romancing diver Samantha Mathis while he portrayed a con man in the misguided comedy "Mrs. Winterbourne" (1996). Dean scored as the easily manipulated husband of a woman who hides her extramarital affair by claiming she was assaulted by an African American in John Singleton's "Rosewood" (1997). Also that year, he portrayed two detectives investigating crimes: a murder in the sci-fi themed "Gattaca", alongside Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and the disappearance of a Hollywood producer (Bill Pullman) in Wim Wenders' "The End of the Violence".
The actor has continued to return to the stage as well as making the occasional TV appearance in such prestige efforts as "Arthur Miller's 'The American Clock'" (TNT, 1993) and the miniseries "JFK: Reckless Youth" (ABC, 1993). In the former, Dean played the authorial stand-in, Lee Baumier, who tries to use his bicycle to earn money in the Depression-era drama, while in the latter, he was cast as Joseph Kennedy Jr.