Character actor Steve Eastin, 78, was spotted in Los Angeles this week, more than five decades into a Hollywood career that has put him opposite some of the biggest leading men of the past 40 years.
Eastin is best known for playing the ghost of disgraced Chicago White Sox player Eddie "Knuckles" Cicotte in the 1989 baseball film Field of Dreams, which starred Kevin Costner and was nominated for the best picture Oscar. Over the decades he has also worked alongside Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney and Dave Chappelle.
Early life and Hollywood debut
Ronald Steve Eastin was born in rural Colorado in 1948, after his pregnant mother survived a car accident that killed her cousin and sent her into premature labor.
He caught the acting bug young, training at a local theater from the age of six. Two years later he told his father his career plan. "I figured out what I want to do with my life. I want to be a major league baseball pitcher or a movie actor," he said, according to his autobiography, Born in a Fatal Car Crash:..And Other Dramatic Entrances.
As a young performer he appeared in two musicals choreographed by Michael Bennett, the director and choreographer behind A Chorus Line. In 1972, at 24, he earned his Screen Actors Guild card for an uncredited role in the Clint Eastwood western Joe Kidd, his first film.
He went on to appear in television shows including TJ Hooker, CHiPs and Little House on the Prairie, as well as the 1985 horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.
Field of Dreams and Catch Me If You Can
Eastin's profile rose in 1989 with Field of Dreams, in which his character, the ghost of Eddie Cicotte, chortles "I'm melting, I'm melting" as he dematerializes. The cast included James Earl Jones, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta and Amy Madigan. Eastin has said his co-star Lancaster had been one of his inspirations to become an actor, through films including Elmer Gantry and Come Back, Little Sheba, he told The Renegade Rise Podcast.
Eastin also appears in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can as a Pan Am employee who tells Leonardo DiCaprio's con man character, Frank Abagnale Jr, about "some nut" nicknamed "the Skywayman," who had been flying around the country posing as a Pan Am pilot and earned the title "the James Bond of the Sky."
More recently, he played an auto worker laid off over video call in a climactic scene from Up in the Air, the 2009 dramedy starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. "It was a guy who made people feel like their own father had gotten fired," Eastin said in an interview with Shock Cinema.
Con Air and a friendship with Dave Chappelle
In the 1997 thriller Con Air, Eastin starred alongside Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames and Mykelti Williamson, playing a corrections officer aboard a plane hijacked during a prisoner exchange. His character clashed memorably on screen with one played by Dave Chappelle, though the two actors developed a warm friendship during the Utah shoot.
"The very first day I got on location for Con Air, I walked into the lobby of the hotel in Park City and there was a tall, skinny African American kid standing there. And Park City is really white, so you could tell he was probably feeling like a stranger in a strange land," Eastin recalled. "So I walked over to him. I said: 'Hey man! Are you doing the movie?' He said: 'Yeah, I'm Dave Chappelle.' I said: 'I'm Steve! Do you wanna come up to my room and smoke a joint?' He said: 'Y-e-a-h!' Ha!"
The pair went on to improvise a fan-favorite exchange in the film, in which Eastin's character complains, "Oh, man, it smells like someone s*** in your mouth," and Chappelle's replies, "He said he loved me."
Bonding with Nicolas Cage on Matchstick Men
Eastin also worked with Cage on the 2003 Ridley Scott crime comedy Matchstick Men, spending two days filming together. During the shoot, Eastin mentioned to Cage that it was his daughter's 18th birthday and asked the Oscar winner if he would wish her well.
That evening, while Eastin and his daughter were at a food truck at the bottom of a hill and Cage was some distance up the slope, having just finished shooting a scene, Cage came down to greet her. "He looks down and he walks all the way down the hill and says to my daughter: 'Happy birthday, baby!' and he gives her a kiss. Then he ran back up the hill to his car," Eastin said. "I just thought that was a real class thing to do."
Later roles and what comes next
Eastin's other credits include an umpire in the 1999 comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, a detective in Brian De Palma's 2006 film The Black Dahlia, based on the James Ellroy novel about an unsolved 1940s Los Angeles murder, and John Calvin Pollock, the real-life jurist who presided over a case involving the Osage murders, in Martin Scorsese's 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon, starring DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
For decades, Eastin has also worked as an acting coach, whose students have included Michael Fishman, best known for playing DJ on Roseanne.
Eastin told the Daily Mail he is "continuing to work out of Los Angeles in film, television, commercials, music, and voice." He said he is "currently under consideration" for a role in the revival of Matlock, led by Kathy Bates, having previously guest-starred in the 1990s on the original series starring Andy Griffith as the titular attorney.
Eastin noted that his 2024 memoir, Born in a Fatal Car Crash:..And Other Dramatic Entrances, is available to buy on Amazon.
