Skeet Ulrich

Wes Craven's Scream needed a villain who could pass as the boyfriend for forty minutes before becoming the monster. Skeet Ulrich got that part in 1996, and the casting worked: good-looking enough to be plausible, unsettling enough to make you nervous. Billy Loomis became the template for the self-aware slasher villain, and Scream turned horror into a business model for the rest of the decade. His career that year also included The Craft and Boys, all three trading on the same dangerous-youth energy that defined mid-90s Hollywood. The A-list career that should have followed mostly didn't.

Television rescued Ulrich when film didn't. Riverdale gave him FP Jones, Jughead's biker-gang-leading father, and kept him as a series regular from 2017 to 2021. He departed by publicly telling fans he 'got bored creatively.' The exit generated more press than most of his projects had in years. He reprised Billy Loomis in Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023), less a comeback than mythology maintenance. In 2024, he starred in Parish on AMC opposite Giancarlo Esposito, still looking for the role that makes the second act worth remembering.

The name 'Skeet' started with a Little League coach who called him 'Skeeter' because he was small and moved fast. He grew up in poor health, including open-heart surgery to repair a defective ventricle, and was accidentally stabbed during Scream production near the same scar. That combination of fragility and barely-contained menace tracks with his filmography. Between acting jobs, he builds furniture in a home workshop, which is either the most grounded thing about him or the least surprising.