Do we like Tom Skerritt?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up, and a veterans' charity he co-founded is real good, though the public record on his views is thin.
Thomas Skerritt was born in Detroit in 1933 and has described himself as a working-class kid from the city. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1951, straight out of high school, and served until 1955 as a classification specialist at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas. Then came UCLA and a turn to the theatre.
Hollywood work followed: early TV including My Three Sons and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, then Hal Ashby cast him as a cop in Harold and Maude. He was an enlistee in the original M*A*S*H, Captain Dallas in Alien, and Viper in Top Gun. Plenty of dads, sheriffs and commanding officers in between, which is a pretty fair summary of a career.
His peak telly run was Picket Fences, where he played a small-town sheriff and won the 1993 Emmy for lead actor in a drama series. He also directed, including the TV movie Divided by Hate. A writer once called him a character actor trapped in a leading man's body, a line he said he loved.
Now the harm check, and it's a short one, because there isn't much to find. We searched for anything he'd said about LGBTQ+ people, women, vaccines, climate or politics and found no campaigning, no conspiracy rabbit holes and no culture-war grifting. His last film, Broke in 2025, was a rodeo drama with Dennis Quaid and Wyatt Russell, and nothing in the reporting ties that to anything harmful. The record is thin rather than spotless, but there's nothing nasty in it.
The good-person test is where he shines. He co-founded The Red Badge Project in 2012 with a veteran he'd met, running storytelling classes for veterans, and it has since grown to five cities in Washington state with over a thousand participants. Of it, he said he got tired of talking about the problem and wanted to do something about it.
No lawsuits, convictions or credible allegations against him turned up in our searches, which is a rare thing to be able to write about someone with sixty-odd years in showbiz. The only 'controversy' we hit was a junk content-farm rumour, which we're ignoring. Tributes since his death have centred on his gentleness and humour.