Everett McGill

Charles Everett McGill III was born on October 21, 1945, in Miami Beach, Florida. He completed his secondary education at Rosedale High School in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1963, then earned a degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1967. He subsequently built a stage career in New York, appearing on Broadway between 1972 and 1980.

McGill's Broadway work encompassed several notable productions. He appeared in A Texas Trilogy: Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, Equus, a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Merchant, and The Merchant of Venice. His performance in 1977 earned him a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play. During this same period, in 1975 and 1976, he also took on the role of Chad Richards on the television soap opera The Guiding Light.

His transition to film began in the late 1970s with supporting roles in Yanks (1979) and Brubaker (1980), the latter starring Robert Redford. McGill gained wider recognition in 1981 when he played Naoh, the lead caveman character, in Quest for Fire. He followed that with the role of Fremen leader Stilgar in David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, beginning a recurring professional relationship with Lynch. That same year he appeared in Silver Bullet, a werewolf film based on a Stephen King story, and in 1986 took roles in both the Korean War film Field of Honor and Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge. In 1988, he played the title character in Iguana, directed by Monte Hellman, and in 1989 appeared in the James Bond film Licence to Kill.

McGill's collaboration with Lynch continued on the television series Twin Peaks, where he played "Big" Ed Hurley from 1990 to 1991. That same year he reunited with Twin Peaks co-star Wendy Robie in Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs, in which both actors portrayed the film's villains. He went on to appear in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) and My Fellow Americans (1996), the latter alongside James Garner and Jack Lemmon. His final credit before retirement was Lynch's The Straight Story (1999), in which he played Tom the John Deere Dealer. McGill retired from acting that year but later came out of retirement to reprise the role of Big Ed Hurley in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks.