Patrick Muldoon packed a remarkable amount of living into 57 years. The square-jawed Californian went from USC football fields to soap opera heartthrob, from Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi universe to prestige independent cinema, all while fronting a rock band and building a quietly impressive producing career on the side. He died of a sudden heart attack at his Beverly Hills home on 19 April 2026, just days before his final film was due in theatres. Hollywood was stunned.
Biography
William Patrick Muldoon III was born on 27 September 1968 in San Pedro, California, a working-class waterfront neighbourhood of Los Angeles. His father, William Patrick Muldoon II, was a personal injury and maritime attorney; his mother, Deanna (née Petrov), was a homemaker. He grew up navigating two big immigrant family cultures, Irish on his father’s side and Croatian on his mother’s, and he spoke warmly about both throughout his life. His parents had artistic leanings in painting, writing, and music, and those influences clearly took root.
Muldoon attended Loyola High School, the well-regarded Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, before enrolling at the University of Southern California. He majored in English and communications, joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, and played tight end for the USC Trojans football team, earning two Rose Bowl rings along the way. He graduated in 1991, though his pivot to the entertainment industry had already begun. Posing for the “Men of USC” calendar caught the attention of talent scouts, landing him a contract with the Wilhelmina Modelling Agency and a Calvin Klein jeans campaign. The path from football pitch to runway to soundstage took a matter of months. His only sibling, sister Shana Muldoon-Zappa, later married Ahmet Zappa, son of rock legend Frank Zappa, making the Muldoon family improbable in-laws to American music royalty.
Career
Muldoon’s first screen credit came in 1990 on Who’s the Boss?, followed by a three-episode guest arc on Saved by the Bell in 1991. But his real breakthrough arrived in 1992, when NBC’s Days of Our Lives cast him as Austin Reed, the boxer-turned-businessman whose romance with Carrie Brady became one of the decade’s most beloved daytime storylines. He played the role across nearly 500 episodes in two stints, from 1992 to 1995 and again from September 2011 through July 2012, and earned the 1994 Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Male Newcomer along the way.
That daytime success opened doors in primetime almost immediately. In 1995 he joined Aaron Spelling’s glossy Fox drama Melrose Place as Richard Hart, a charming businessman who turned sinister over the course of Season 5. Behind the scenes, Spelling was equally impressed, handing Muldoon an exclusive development deal, reportedly the only one of its kind the studio ever issued to an actor. Their first co-production, the USA Petite Model Show, filmed at Caesars Palace with Ann Lauren and Audrey Landers, was distributed through the Worldvision pipeline on WWOR and WGN.
Then came Paul Verhoeven. In 1997, Muldoon landed the role of Zander Barcalow in Starship Troopers, playing a cocky Mobile Infantry pilot and romantic rival to Casper Van Dien’s Johnny Rico. The film, a sharp satirical sci-fi blockbuster, has grown considerably in critical esteem since its release, and Barcalow’s memorably gruesome death scene at the hands of the Brain Bug remains one of the decade’s most quoted movie moments. Van Dien, one of Muldoon’s closest friends, described himself as “deeply saddened, devastated and overwhelmed” on hearing the news of his passing.
The late 1990s kept him busy across genres. He appeared in D.J. Caruso’s TV thriller Black Cat Run (1998), the Sundance indie Wicked (1998) opposite Julia Stiles, and Rupert Wainwright’s supernatural horror Stigmata (1999). A steady run of genre features and Hallmark and Lifetime productions followed throughout the 2000s and 2010s, including A Boyfriend for Christmas (2004), the Bernie the Dolphin franchise, and A Tale of Two Coreys (2018). He also took on the demanding stage role of Edmund in Patsy Rodenburg’s 2006 production of King Lear.
As the 2010s progressed, Muldoon leaned increasingly into producing through his Storyboard Media company. He produced and starred in Badge of Honor (2015) alongside Martin Sheen and Mena Suvari, then stepped up to bigger productions: Clark Duke’s Ozark crime drama Arkansas (2020), featuring Vince Vaughn, John Malkovich, and Liam Hemsworth, and George Gallo’s The Comeback Trail (2020), opposite Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, and Morgan Freeman. His producing credits also extended to Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, The Tribes of Palos Verdes, and the 2024 Toronto Film Festival premiere Riff Raff. He played Richard Cavendish in Neil Jordan’s 2022 noir Marlowe, starring Liam Neeson.
Music ran through everything he did. As lead vocalist of The Sleeping Masses, formed with collaborator Neil Ives, his band’s song “The Woman Is the Way” closed the 2009 feature Powder Blue and featured on MTV’s The Hills, with a music video shot in Berkshire, England. He released the Muldoon and Ives EP in 2019 and was still writing and recording into 2025, when the solo single “Gray Again” dropped, with an accompanying video filmed alongside Denise Richards for her Bravo series.
At the time of his death, Muldoon was executive-producing Kockroach, an adaptation of William Lashner’s novel directed by Matt Ross and starring Chris Hemsworth, Taron Egerton, Zazie Beetz, and Alec Baldwin, then filming in Australia. His final completed acting role, in the crime thriller Dirty Hands, co-starring Denise Richards and Michael Beach, was released posthumously on 24 April 2026, just five days after he died.
Personal Life
Muldoon never married and had no children, though his romantic life was one of Hollywood’s more colourful open secrets. He first met Denise Richards in an acting class around 1990, and their on-and-off relationship during and after the production of Starship Troopers lasted roughly five years. They remained genuinely close friends; he attended her 2018 wedding to Aaron Phypers and maintained warm ties with her daughters. Around the same period in the 1990s, he also dated Lisa Rinna, who played his on-screen sister Billie on Days of Our Lives, and Tori Spelling. Rinna later brought their relationship to light on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, revealing that she and Richards had unknowingly been seeing the same man.
Later, between approximately 2003 and 2005, Muldoon carried on a relationship with French Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche, a pairing that surprised many who followed his career. At the time of his death he was in a relationship with film producer Miriam Rothbart, his partner of roughly two years, with whom he shared his Beverly Hills home.
His death arrived with no warning. On the morning of 19 April 2026, he had coffee with Rothbart, then stepped into the shower. When he didn’t emerge, she found him unconscious on the bathroom floor. Paramedics were unable to revive him. The cause was identified by family as a massive heart attack. There were no publicly known prior health issues. His sister Shana’s Instagram statement, widely shared in the hours that followed, captured what those who knew him consistently said: “Those that knew my brother knew he IS the brightest light in every room, in any moment, on any day.” He is survived by Miriam Rothbart, his parents, his sister Shana and brother-in-law Ahmet Zappa, and his niece Halo and nephew Arrow Zappa.
Net Worth
At the time of his death, Celebrity Net Worth estimated Patrick Muldoon’s fortune at approximately $1.5 million. That figure draws on three decades of acting fees, producing stakes through Storyboard Media, his Spelling Entertainment development deal, music royalties from The Sleeping Masses and solo releases, and early modelling income from his Wilhelmina and Calvin Klein days. It’s a modest sum relative to some of his costars, but it reflects a career built on consistent, industrious work across nearly every corner of the entertainment business rather than a handful of blockbuster paydays.
