The last thing Patrick Muldoon did in public was celebrate.
On Friday, he posted on Instagram about a film called “Kockroach.” He was executive producing. Chris Hemsworth was starring. Taron Egerton, Zazie Beetz and Alec Baldwin had signed on. Cameras had just started rolling in Australia. After thirty-five years in the business — as a model, a soap star, a prime-time villain, a cult sci-fi lead, and finally, quietly, an executive producer — this was the biggest thing he had ever put his name on.
“So excited to be a part of this amazing project,” he wrote.
Two days later, on Sunday morning, he was dead in his bathroom. He was 57.
A Sunday Like Any Other
He had coffee with his partner, Miriam Rothbart, at their home in Beverly Hills. Then he went to take a shower. When he hadn’t come out after a while, Rothbart went to check on him. She found him collapsed in the bathroom, not breathing.
Paramedics could not revive him. It had been a sudden heart attack. His manager confirmed the death to Variety that night, and his sister, Shana Muldoon-Zappa, described the morning to TMZ the next day.
The Career Before The Career
Most of the tributes that went up over the weekend led with Austin Reed, the aspiring boxer Muldoon played on “Days of Our Lives” from 1992 to 1995, and Richard Hart, the Melrose Place husband-turned-predator who was finally killed in a Season 5 police shootout. Older viewers remembered him as Kelly Kapowski’s boyfriend on “Saved by the Bell,” or as Zander Barcalow in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cult film “Starship Troopers.”
Those were the roles that made him famous. They were not the work he was proudest of at the end.
What He Was Actually Building
Somewhere along the way, without any particular announcement, Muldoon stopped chasing leading-man parts and became an executive producer.
He started a company called Storyboard Productions. His name began appearing in the credits of films a lot more serious than the ones that had made him famous. Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter.” Neil Jordan’s “Marlowe,” starring Liam Neeson. The indie crime drama “Arkansas.” Last year he executive produced “Riff Raff,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival with a cast that included Jennifer Coolidge, Bill Murray and Pete Davidson.
It was a different kind of career than the one he’d started with. Quieter. More respected. The kind of work that takes twenty years to build and tends to arrive right when an actor stops being the youngest face in the room.
He was still acting, too. “Dirty Hands,” a crime thriller with his ex-girlfriend Denise Richards, was scheduled to come out later this year. And then there was “Kockroach” — the biggest name on his slate, still shooting in Australia when he died. His “Starship Troopers” co-star Casper Van Dien had dropped by the Friday Instagram post to congratulate him. By Sunday afternoon, that comment thread had turned into a memorial.
Bobo
The people who loved him called him Bobo. On his own Instagram bio, he described himself in seven words: actor, producer, musician, in the most rock and roll way possible.
He sang and played guitar in a band he had co-founded with Neil Graham Ives, called The Sleeping Masses. Their 2009 track “The Woman Is The Way” ended up on an episode of MTV’s “The Hills.” The people who knew him treated his music the way he did — as a serious second life, not a hobby he picked up between auditions.
In tributes to Deadline, they remembered his humor, his poetry, his hugs, the way he made people feel seen. His “Days of Our Lives” co-star Alison Sweeney wrote on X that he was “brilliantly talented, endlessly kind, and generous in spirit.”
He is survived by Rothbart; his parents, Deanna and Patrick Muldoon Sr.; his sister, Shana, and her husband, Ahmet Zappa, the son of Frank Zappa; and their children, Halo and Arrow.
One of those friends, describing him to Deadline, said he had embraced each day “with a full-tilt, rock ‘n’ roll spirit.” That was exactly what he had always said he was.