Tom Skerritt Got Top Billing in Alien and Ran the School in Top Gun. Here Is Where to Stream His Essential Movies.

Tom Skerritt, who died Wednesday, October 21, at his home in Seattle at 93, spent six decades playing the man in charge. He captained the Nostromo in Alien, commanded the Navy's Top Gun school in Top Gun, played Brad Pitt's preacher father in A River Runs Through It, and won an Emmy as a small-town sheriff on Picket Fences. His family said he died of natural causes.

He was born in Detroit in 1933, served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955, and made his film debut in War Hunt in 1962. In 1997 he described himself to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a "character actor locked in a leading man's body," and the filmography bears him out: top billing when a director needed a steady center, a spot further down the cast list when a star needed someone solid to push against. Ridley Scott and Tony Scott both cast him. So did Robert Altman, David Cronenberg, Robert Redford and Robert Zemeckis.

Here are his essential roles, in the order he made them, with a full where-to-stream list at the end.

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The Altman years: *M\*A\*S\*H* and *Thieves Like Us*

His breakthrough came from Robert Altman. In M*A*S*H (1970) he plays Duke Forrest, the Georgia surgeon who rolls into the 4077th alongside Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye, and the film went on to win the top prize at Cannes. Four years later Altman gave him a smaller, sharper part in Thieves Like Us, his Depression-era story of young bank robbers on the run in Mississippi.

The captain who climbs into the vents: *Alien* (1979)

Skerritt turned Alien down the first time. As he told Consequence in 2019, his reaction to the original budget was: "Two million bucks? Are they gonna get Ed Wood to do this?" Producer Gordon Carroll called back from England with a $10 million budget and a new director, Ridley Scott, whose first feature, The Duellists, had impressed him. He said yes, and by his own account ended up following Scott around "like a puppy."

He was billed first, ahead of Sigourney Weaver in her first leading role, and that billing is the movie's sleight of hand. Dallas is the captain, the calm voice on the intercom, the man a 1979 audience would expect to survive. Then he climbs into the air shafts with a flamethrower to drive the creature toward an airlock, and the film's real lead steps forward. Skerritt plays him with so little vanity that the handoff feels inevitable. The 2003 director's cut restores a scene in which Ripley finds him again, cocooned and begging her to kill him.

It is still the film at the top of our Alien movies ranked list, and Dallas is a big part of why it works.

The boss: *The Dead Zone* (1983) and *Top Gun* (1986)

In David Cronenberg's Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone, he is Sheriff George Bannerman, who asks Christopher Walken's reluctant psychic to help him catch a serial killer and gets an answer from inside his own department.

Then came Commander Mike "Viper" Metcalf, the commanding officer of Top Gun and the coolest head in a movie full of hot ones. Viper flew with Maverick's father, and he is the one who finally tells Maverick how his father died. Tom Cruise gets the volleyball and the motorcycle. Skerritt gets the authority. Viper did not return for Top Gun: Maverick in 2022.

The fathers: *Steel Magnolias* (1989) and *A River Runs Through It* (1992)

Herbert Ross had cast him as Shirley MacLaine's patient husband in The Turning Point (1977), which earned 11 Oscar nominations and won none. Twelve years later Ross brought him back for Steel Magnolias as Drum Eatenton: husband to Sally Field's M'Lynn, father to Julia Roberts's Shelby, and the man firing a shotgun at the birds in the trees on the morning of his daughter's wedding.

Robert Redford's adaptation of Norman Maclean's semi-autobiographical novella gave him what may be his finest role. Reverend Maclean is a Presbyterian minister in Montana who raises two sons, Craig Sheffer's Norman and Brad Pitt's Paul, on the idea that fly-fishing and grace come from the same discipline. Skerritt is stern without being cold, and the film's grief lands on his face. It won the Oscar for cinematography.

The schemer: *Contact* (1997)

Robert Zemeckis cast him against his reassuring type. David Drumlin cuts Jodie Foster's funding, steps in front of the cameras once her signal from Vega turns out to be real, and talks his way into the seat on the machine she had fought for. Skerritt plays him as charming and plausible, which makes him far worse than a sneering villain would be.

On television: *Cheers* and *Picket Fences*

On Cheers he was Evan Drake, the corporate boss Kirstie Alley's Rebecca spends the sixth season chasing. Then came Sheriff Jimmy Brock on David E. Kelley's Picket Fences, set in the very strange town of Rome, Wisconsin, which ran 88 episodes on CBS from 1992 to 1996. It won him the 1993 Emmy for lead actor in a drama series and a second nomination in 1994. If you keep a TV show tier list, it belongs on it.

The last act: *Lucky* (2017) and *East of the Mountains* (2021)

In Lucky, John Carroll Lynch's first film as director, Skerritt reunited with his Alien crewmate Harry Dean Stanton. He has one scene, as Fred, a fellow World War II veteran who shares coffee with Stanton in a diner and remembers landing on Okinawa. The film reached theaters two weeks after Stanton died and became his final starring role.

At 88 he carried a movie as its lead: East of the Mountains, from David Guterson's novel, in which he plays a retired heart surgeon with terminal cancer who takes his dog back to the eastern Washington country where he grew up. Off camera, he helped found TheFilmSchool in Seattle and co-founded the Red Badge Project, which helps veterans work through PTSD by writing about their experiences.

Where to stream Tom Skerritt's movies right now

US availability as of October 23, 2026, per JustWatch data on TMDB. Deals change often, so check before you settle in.

• Alien (1979): Netflix
• Top Gun (1986): Paramount+, or free with ads on Pluto TV
• The Dead Zone (1983): Paramount+ and AMC+
• Steel Magnolias (1989): Netflix and Paramount+, or free with ads on The Roku Channel
• A River Runs Through It (1992): the Sony Pictures Core channel on Prime Video
• Lucky (2017): Netflix and Prime Video, or free on Tubi and Kanopy
• East of the Mountains (2021): Prime Video, or free with ads on Tubi
• Cheers: Hulu and Paramount+, or free on Pluto TV
• Contact (1997) and M*A*S*H (1970): digital rental only
• Picket Fences: digital purchase only

Rank him yourself

Is Alien his best film or just his most famous? Add the ones you have seen to a list on Shortlist and rank them head to head, two at a time, until the order sorts itself out. Our movie tier list guide shows how.

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