Peter Greene

Peter Green was born on May 10, 1959, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[1] He was one of three siblings, with a brother and a sister.^[2] In his youth he was a choirboy at his local church.^[3] He was a student at Montclair High School.^[3] However, he ran away from home at the age of 15 and was homeless for a few years.^[4] He had dropped out of high school and lived in New York working various odd jobs including as a busboy.^[3] It was during this time that he was introduce to both using and selling hard drugs.^[5]

He did not pursue a career in acting until his mid-20s.^[6] It was then that he studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York City and studied method acting.^[4]

When registering for the Screen Actors Guild, he decided to change the spelling of his name to "Peter Greene".^[3] He initially landed several small roles in cinema and television in the early 1990s.^[6] His television debut was on the NBC crime drama Hardball in 1990.^[7] Greene later made his film debut in Laws of Gravity (1992).^[8] During the production of the film Judgement Night, he was found with a crack pipe.^[9] He played the schizophrenic Peter Winter in Clean, Shaven (1993).^[10] In Pulp Fiction, Greene appeared as a security guard named Zed.^[11] The character of Zed is meant to pay homage to the 1972 film Deliverance.^[12] The Mask was a film starring Jim Carrey, where Greene played the villainous Dorian Tyrell. Greene played the character for the majority of the film, however towards the end Tyrell himself puts on the magical mask that grants him magical abilities, where the character is then played alternatively by actor Garret T. Sato and stuntman Jeep Swenson.^[8]

The Usual Suspects saw him play the character of Redfoot.^[13] Greene often played villains, such as in Judgment Night (1993),^[10] Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995),^[10] The Rich Man's Wife (1996),^[10] Training Day (2001)^[10] (as a corrupt narcotics officer), and The Bounty Hunter (2010).^[10]

Greene worked with director Jordan Alan twice: once on the film Kiss & Tell (1997),^[10] a dark comic turn and then again four years later in The Gentleman Bandit (aka Gentleman B).^[10] After Greene's arrests in 1998 for drug related crimes, Alan had to put the actor through rehab to get him through the second film and eventually, after coming upon Greene doing heroin with Mike Starr, he was forced to replace Greene's voice because of the vocal problems caused by drugs. Despite these problems, Alan vouched for Greene to producer Tobe Jaffe for the movie Blue Streak,^[10] in which Greene played Martin Lawrence's nemesis.

Greene continued to work mostly as a character actor. He appeared in the short-lived television dramas The Black Donnellys^[10] and Life on Mars (2009).^[10] He also appeared as a policeman in Prodigy and Mobb Deep's video for "A,B,C's", as well as the focal character in House of Pain's video for "Fed Up".^[10] Greene appeared in the opening scene of the premiere of the FX series Justified where he was characterized as a "thuggish Peter Weller lookalike" by reviewer Scott Tobias, writing for The A.V. Club.^[14] His later roles included the film New York New York (2016)^[10] and the miniseries The Continental (2023).^[10] He appeared in two films by director Eric Brian Hughes: Turnabout (2016) and Exit 0 (2019). Greene appears in the digital series The Jersey Connection by filmmaker Tim Firtion.^[10] Greene was featured in the 2020 TV series For Life in a small role as an Aryan Brother named "Wild Bill" Miller.^[10]

By the time of his death, he had been given a role in an upcoming Mickey Rourke movie called Mascots, and was involved in at least two other projects.^[15] He was also working on and planned to narrate a documentary on USAID titled From the American People: The Withdrawal of USAID which had been funded via GoFundMe.^[16][2]

Greene had one son.^[11] He struggled with heroin and cocaine addiction in the 1990s and additionally he was arrested for possessing crack cocaine in 2007.^[17] He also attempted to commit suicide in March 1996 which he revealed in an interview with Premier magazine.^[18] After the attempt, he successfully sought addiction treatment.^[4]

Greene died at his Lower East Side apartment in Manhattan, New York City, on December 12, 2025, at the age of 66.^[19] Police were called to perform a wellness check after music had been playing for a full day in the apartment.^[1] The neighbor who discovered Greene's body revealed to the New York Daily News that Greene was found "lying on the floor, face down, facial injury and blood".^[15] The very day he was found by police he was to undergo a medical procedure to remove a benign tumor from his body.^[4] A note was also confirmed to be found where Greene claimed "I'm still a Westie."^[15] In February 2026, the cause of death was declared an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound to the left axilla causing injury of the brachial artery.^[20]