What Happened To The Cast Of The 1994 Wyatt Earp Movie

“Tombstone,” from 1993, is the Wyatt Earp movie most people remember from the ’90s, but it’s hardly the only star-studded spectacle about the legendary marshal. A year later, “Wyatt Earp” came out, reuniting actor Kevin Costner with filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan, the director who first made him a charismatic cowboy in 1985’s “Silverado.” A love of the old west clearly stuck with Costner, who made his directorial debut with “Dances With Wolves,” an epic about a Union Army Lieutenant (Costner) who goes native. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve probably at least heard the plot of “Avatar” compared (unfavorably) to it. It won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and another for Costner as Best Director.

Covering more of Earp’s life than just the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, “Wyatt Earp” came loaded with actors both familiar and new, as one would expect of an old Hollywood epic biopic. It was intended as a 6-hour miniseries, but became a 3-hour epic movie. Audiences, though, weren’t ready for it, and nor were critics, several of whom put it on worst-of-year lists. Costner had arguably lost a lot of love following “Dances With Wolves” by starring in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” in which his sleepwalking, decidedly non-English performance veered on accidental camp. Still, those who did not forgive him then have learned to appreciate his more appropriately cast role as Wyatt Earp in the years since.

Besides Costner, the supporting cast is ridiculously stacked. Here’s a reminder of just who all was in the movie, and what happened to the cast of “Wyatt Earp” since it was released.

Perhaps because of his great success at the box office and the Oscars as the director and star of “Dances With Wolves,” Kevin Costner seems to have found lengthy westerns and neo-westerns to be his comfort zone, and the real reason may be simpler than you think. After “Wyatt Earp” came two post-apocalyptic takes on the genre: “Waterworld,” directed by his longtime pal Kevin Reynolds but ultimately creatively controlled by Costner, and “The Postman,” directed by Costner. Those two movies’ lack of success did not deter him — he recently attempted to make a four-movie western epic called “Horizon: An American Saga.” The first film flopped, the second is in release limbo as of this writing, and it’s not looking good for the other planned sequels.

Luckily for Costner, he is not just a filmmaker, but he’s also a popular actor, who has starred in such beloved classics as “Field of Dreams,” “JFK,” “The Bodyguard,” “No Way Out,” and “Bull Durham.” These days he’s best known for Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone,” a modern-day series surrounding the drama at a ranch near Yellowstone National Park (seen above). Most recently, as of this writing, he was spotted convincingly playing the role of an awkward audience member at the “Saturday Night Live” 50th anniversary show.

Val Kilmer’s take on Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” gets all the love, but Quaid’s take deserves some as well, and not just because he lost 40lbs for it, which affected him long after shooting was done. It certainly didn’t hurt his career, as he recently stole his scenes in the Academy award-nominated “The Substance,” as a hypocritical aging TV executive who only likes putting younger women on the air…and who can grotesquely demolish a plate of shrimp. He also starred as the former president in “Reagan,” a biopic aimed at conservative Christian audiences, emphasizing the 40th chief executive’s faith (pictured above). 

But Quaid’s had a long career — other popular films starring Quaid include “InnerSpace,” “Dreamscape,” “Enemy Mine,” “Great Balls of Fire,””Dragonheart,” and “Far From Heaven.” In the 2023 canine comedy “Strays,” he played himself, spoofing his role in the tear-jerker “A Dog’s Purpose.” His love of dogs isn’t just for the cameras, as he also cohosts a podcast about pets and pet culture. 

Quaid’s son Jack now has a successful acting career as well, as Hughie in “The Boys” and Bradward Boimler on “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”

A legitimate tough guy and one of Hollywood’s most notable former Marines, Gene Hackman remains best known as racist roughneck cop Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection,” for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor; and genius arch-villain Lex Luthor in three of the four Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies. 

Immediately prior to winning the role of Wyatt Earp’s father, he won his second Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, for his role in Clint Eastwood’s western “Unforgiven” (shown above). He also received Oscar nominations for “Bonnie and Clyde,” “I Never Sang for My Father,” and “Mississippi Burning.” Following “Wyatt Earp,” he appeared in another western, Sam Raimi’s “The Quick and the Dead,” and continued to appear in hit movies like “The Birdcage” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” both of which played his hardened persona for laughs.

Following the Ray Romano comedy “Welcome to Mooseport” in 2004, Hackman formally retired from acting. He has since written several fiction novels, and as of this article, he remains alive at the age of 95, the oldest living Academy Award winner for Best Actor.

It makes some sort of sense that the less-known Earp brother, a saloon-keeper who was not at the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, would be played by a lesser-known actor. David Andrews is perhaps most recognizable as lead of Steve De Jarnatt’s cult post-apocalypse film “Cherry 2000,” which helped to make a star of Melanie Griffith, and the loose Stephen King adaptation “Graveyard Shift,” about killer rats. Though he has steadily worked as a character actor since his debut in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” his most notable onscreen roles since “Wyatt Earp” may have been as General Brewster in “Terminator 3” (seen above) and Scooter Libby in “Fair Game.”

Originally a practicing lawyer and a graduate of Stanford, the Louisiana-raised actor has most recently been seen on TV shows like “The Boys,” “The Black Hamptons,” “Queen of the South,” and “Watchmen.” He tends to play cops, politicians, and authority figures, and in 2015, he appeared on both “NCIS” and “The Whispers” as the U.S. Secretary of Defense (albeit as two different characters).

Linden Ashby’s most famous role came right after “Wyatt Earp,” when he portrayed Johnny Cage in 1995’s “Mortal Kombat,” the first video-game based movie to achieve commercial success and not-terrible contemporaneous reviews. As co-lead with Robin Shou (Liu Kang) and Bridgette Wilson (Sonya Blade), Ashby added a wry humor to his costars’ more serious approach, as the character in the otherworldly fighting tournament competing more for glory and ego than revenge.

Ashby made his movie debut in the 1990 erotic horror “Night Angel,” as the hero on the trail of the evil demonic seductress Lilith, first wife of the biblical Adam. Movie roles since have included a reunion with “Kombat” director Paul W. S. Anderson for “Resident Evil: Extinction” and a small role in “Iron Man 3,” but he’s best known for his TV work. He played Sheriff Noah Stilinski throughout the run of the “Teen Wolf” TV series (pictured above) and its reunion movie, and to this day, he still appears as Cameron Kirsten on the long-running daytime soap “The Young and the Restless,” a role he first played in 2003, took a two-decade hiatus from, and then returned to.

Prior to playing antagonist Ike Clanton, Jeff Fahey’s first major movie role was opposite Costner in “Silverado,” making “Wyatt Earp” a western reunion between them and director Kasdan. He’s best-known, however, for “The Lawnmower Man,” an early virtual reality based thriller from 1992, in which he plays a developmentally disabled gardener who becomes a powerful digital AI being following a series of experiments involving drugs and virtual reality. It was extremely loosely based on a Stephen King short story; so loosely, in fact, that King sued to have his name removed.

Working steadily in B-movies, Fahey was rediscovered by Robert Rodriguez for “Grindhouse,” and they subsequently worked together on “Machete” and “Alita: Battle Angel” (above). The renewed visibility may have helped score him the key role of Captain Frank Lapidus on “Lost” for three seasons. Costner certainly remembered his western work fondly, casting him recently in the first of his four proposed “Horizon: An American Saga” movies.

When he is not acting, Fahey frequently does humanitarian work to assist warehoused refugees.

As Josie Marcus, the love interest torn between Wyatt and Sheriff Behan (see below), Joanna Going made her movie debut in “Wyatt Earp,” following years on the soap operas “search for Tomorrow,” “Another World,” and the 1991 reboot of “Dark Shadows.” Other notable films in her body of work include “Runaway Jury,” with Gene Hackman again, Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” and the 1998 Dean Koontz adaptation “Phantoms,” which gained cult status after being the butt of a joke in Kevin Smith’s “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” about Ben Affleck being “the bomb” in it. She was married to actor Dylan Walsh from 2004 through 2012.

Having appeared on acclaimed prestige TV shows like “House of Cards” (seen above), “Criminal Minds,” and “Mad Men,” she can currently be seen on Max’s real-time medical drama “The Pitt,” and heard on the paranormal noir scripted podcast “Agent Stoker.”

Mark Harmon, who played the aforementioned Johnny Behan, like his onscreen wife, also did his time in soaps, as Fielding Carlyle on the prime-time “Flamingo Road.” This was followed by, among other shows, “St. Elsewhere” from 1983-1986, followed by a breakthrough movie role in the high-concept comedy “Summer School” and the mismatched-partner crime drama “The Presidio,” opposite Sean Connery. His biggest movie role since “Wyatt Earp” has been as Jamie Lee Curtis’ fiance Ryan in the 2003 “Freaky Friday” remake and its upcoming sequel.

On TV, however, he may forever be known as Leroy Jethro Gibbs, star of “NCIS” for the better part of 19 years. The accomplished marksman remained a stoic leader with little tolerance for nonsense and a list of 50 rules to live by. In real life, not everyone liked his style — costar Pauley Perrette refused to share scenes with him and said she had nightmares about him attacking her, after an incident in which his previously docile dog severely bit a crew member.

In addition to his imminent return in “Freakier Friday,” Harmon continues to narrate the prequel series “NCIS: Origins.”

Playing the other-other-other Earp brother Virgil is Michael Madsen, best known for his collaborations with director Quentin Tarantino. It began with his infamous ear-cutting scene in “Reservoir Dogs” and continued through “Kill Bill,” “Sin City,” “The Hateful Eight,” and “Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.” 

A father of six (one of whom is sadly deceased now), he freely admits to taking every role he can for the money, including movies he knows are bad, like Uwe Boll’s “BloodRayne.” In 1994, “Wyatt Earp” was one of six movies he appeared in, along with “The Getaway,” “Blue Tiger,” “Felidae,” “Season of Change,” and “Final Combination.” His sister, Virginia Madsen, who started acting shortly after Michael, is an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress in 2004’s “Sideways.”

Despite his indiscriminate approach to work, Michael has ended up in several gems along the way, including “The Doors,” “Thelma & Louise,” “The Natural,” “Free Willy,” and “Species.” Following “Wyatt Earp,” his most prominent non-Tarantino film was 1997’s “Donnie Brasco,” but we’ve ranked his 15 best films over here, for those who are curious.) He continues to work non-stop, with 21 projects in various stages of production or prerelease as of this writing.

Prior to playing Wyatt’s sister Allie in “Wyatt Earp,” Catherine O’Hara may have had the most impressive resume in the cast. An “SCTV” (that’s Second City TV) alumnus, she became an icon of the goth set by voicing Sally in “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” and playing deranged designer and distracted mom Delia Deetz in Burton’s “Beetlejuice” (and eventually its sequel, seen above). She went on to play the even more distracted mom in the first two “Home Alone” movies, accidentally leaving Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin to fend for himself twice.

After “Wyatt Earp,” she became a regular cast member in Christopher Guest’s improvisational comedies “Waiting for Guffman, “”Best in Show,” “A Mighty Wind,” and “For Your Consideration.” More recently, on TV, she starred in the extremely quotable “Schitt’s Creek” alongside fellow Guest regular and former “SCTV” partner Eugene Levy. She’s gone on to do many more voice-over roles in animation, including in the recent Oscar frontrunner “The Wild Robot.” 

She’s married to Bo Welch, production designer on “Lemony Snicket’s a Series of Unfortunate Events,” and she’s the only actor from the movie to also appear in the Netflix reboot, for which Welch directed a few episodes and served again as production designer.

Following some early lead roles in “Spaceballs” and Wes Craven’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” Bill Pullman spent a significant stretch of his career playing “the other guy” in movies like “The Favor,” “Sommersby” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” Michael Showalter’s rom-com riff “The Baxter” is based specifically on the type of character often played by Pullman, who loses the girl to the main character.

Two years after playing the eldest of the law-enforcing Masterson brothers in “Wyatt Earp,” however, he would cement his place in pop culture history as President Thomas J. Whitmore, the fighting chief executive of “Independence Day,” who leads Earth’s counterattack against alien invaders with a rousing speech declaring the world’s independence from space creatures. The following year, he starred in David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” and Wim Wenders’ “The End of Violence.”

He’s worked steadily ever since, most recently on TV on shows like “The Sinner” and “Murdaugh Murders: the Movie” (seen above). 

Isabella Rossellini took on the part of Doc Holliday’s companion Mary Katherine Horony, more insultingly known by her schnozz-inspired nickname. The daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini was born to be in pictures, and she put herself through college working as a reporter for Italian TV. It was through work that she met Martin Scorsese, whom she soon thereafter married for three years.

After a successful career as a model, she shot to movie stardom in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” as she also became Lynch’s partner for five years. Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Death Becomes Her” preceded “Wyatt Earp,” which she followed with Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s “Big Night” and Abel Ferrara’s “The Funeral.” She consistently works with acclaimed directors, like Guy Maddin in “The Saddest Music in the World,” James Gray in “Two Lovers,” Denis Villeneuve in “Enemy,” and Brad Bird in “The Incredibles 2.” Plus, she had a hilarious recurring role in “30 Rock” as the ex-wife of NBC executive Jack Donaghey (Alec Baldwin).

Most recently, she added female energy to 2024’s mostly male-cast “Conclave,” about Catholic priests voting for the next Pope. The movie (pictured above) scored eight Oscar nominations, including one for her as Best Supporting Actress.

Tom Sizemore’s Master’s degree in theater served him well, career-wise: Long before “Wyatt Earp,” he made his movie acting debut in the Sylvester Stallone prison movie “Lock Up,” followed shortly thereafter by Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel.” Other hit movies like “Point Break,” “Passenger 57,” and “True Romance” followed before he landed the role of gunfighter and journalist Bat Masterson.

His star only rose from there, with parts in “Natural Born Killers,” “Strange Days, ” and “Heat.” Usually a character actor, playing soldiers and cops and other tough guys, he got to be the male lead in 1997’s monster movie “The Relic.” Then came “Saving Private Ryan,” opposite Tom Hanks, which became one of the most brutal and acclaimed war movies ever made (seen above). More war epics followed, with both “Black Hawk Down” and “Pearl Harbor” in 2001.

Things started to go downhill in his personal life after that, when he was arrested for domestic violence in 2003 and subsequently sentenced to jail for seven months in 2005. Addiction got the better of him, and more drug abuse and domestic abuse charges followed. He continued to work steadily, including appearing on rehab reality shows, but the projects were no longer A-list movies. Sizemore did, however, manage some decent TV guest spots on “Law & Order: SVU,” “Lucifer,” “Shooter,” and the third (revival) season of “Twin Peaks.”

Sizemore died of an aneurysm in 2023, aged 61. 

JoBeth Williams (Bessie Earp) is best known as the mom in the “Poltergeist” movies, in addition to parts in “Kramer vs. Kramer,” ‘The Day After,” and “The Big Chill.” More recently, she’s appeared on shows like “Station 19” (above right) and “The Good Doctor.”

Meanwhile, Mare Winningham (Mattie Blaylock) came to fame in the ’80s in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Nobody’s Fool,” and the cult apocalyptic romance “Miracle Mile.” After “Earp”, she worked with Kevin Costner again in “The War” and “Swing Vote,” and was Oscar-nominated in 1995 for “Georgia.” She recently married her “Miracle Mile” costar Anthony Edwards, 35 years after first meeting him.

Jim Caviezel turned down a Juilliard scholarship to take the role of Warren Earp. He went on to star in “The Thin Red Line” and “The Passion of the Christ,” and most recently was part of the surprise hit “Sound of Freedom” (above middle).

 Adam Baldwin (Tom McLaury) is best known as foul-mouthed soldier Animal Mother in “Full Metal Jacket,” and Jayne Cobb on Joss Whedon’s “Firefly.” He was the lead in the TV show “The Last Ship” and recently appeared in Fox’s “9-1-1: Lone Star” (above left)

To wrap things up, Tea Leoni (Sally) went on to star in “Bad Boys,” “Deep Impact,” and CBS’ “Madam Secretary.” Annabeth Gish (Urilla Sutherland), known for movies like “Mystic Pizza,” went on to costar in “The X-Files.” She recently played Dr. Anne Sullivan on “Pretty Little Liars.” Karen Grassle (Mrs. Sutherland) is mostly retired, but will forever be Caroline Ingalls from “Little House on the Prairie.” Finally, Martin Kove (Ed Ross) played Sensei Kreese in “The Karate Kid” and reprised the role in “Cobra Kai.”