Inside Skeet Ulrich's Tragic Childhood
Before he was a killer in the "Scream" franchise, a shady father on "Riverdale," and the dastardly model from the beginning of "As Good As It Gets," Skeet Ulrich was Bryan Ray Trout of Lynchburg, Virginia, born in 1970. Per Los Angeles Magazine, "Ulrich" came from his mother's second husband, D.K. Ulrich; "Skeet" came after a coach said that the short, slightly-built kid buzzed around like a mosquito (whether it was his soccer or softball coach depends on who's telling the story). Before a stepfather entered the picture, young Skeet was already connected to the world of auto racing. Per The New York Times, his mother came from a racing family (her father and brother both drove for NASCAR), the family relocated near Charlotte Motor Speedway, and she founded a sport-management company tailored to race drivers.
Having the chance to meet NASCAR drivers as a boy, however, didn't make Ulrich's childhood ideal. He experienced divorce at the age of 3, forcing him and his older brother to shuffle back and forth between parents. And that was just the beginning of a long and difficult childhood — one that saw kidnapping, frequent illness, and a life-threatening operation. As a young man in New York City, Ulrich turned to therapy to work through the impact of these experiences. "I came to the conclusion it would never be fixed," he told Fatherly. But as Ulrich quoted a remark David Mamet made to him for LA Magazine, "If you didn't want to be an actor, you should've had a good childhood."
Ulrich and his brother were kidnapped by their father
In 1997, Skeet Ulrich told The New York Times that he considered D.K. Ulrich to be his real father. Thirteen years later, he told Los Angeles Magazine, "I didn't really have a dad." In neither interview did he have much good to say about his biological father, a hotel chef who went unnamed. The man's frequent moves and remarriages made life difficult for Ulrich and his brother Geof. As for their first stepmother, Ulrich remembered her as a harsh, disciplined woman who wanted the boys to eat canned peas without dropping any — using chopsticks.
But finicky eating habits were the least of the boys' worries when their father kidnapped them. Ulrich was only 6 at the time, and for three years, the man moved them around the east coast. When the brothers finally managed to get back to their mother, their father left their lives altogether. Ulrich didn't see the man again until 1996. After making his name as an actor, he found his father living in Baltimore. During their conversation, the father kept bringing up unpleasant memories. To avoid an emotional reaction, Ulrich took a cue from actress Gena Rowlands and focused on straightening the curtains.
Whether the visit with his father helped Ulrich process anything, having children of his own did help him come to terms with his childhood. He told Fatherly that his New York therapist predicted being a father would help him. "I didn't understand that when I was 23, but he was right," he said. "I get to re-experience my own childhood in a new way and be the parent I wish I'd had."
He was often ill as a child
No sooner had Skeet Ulrich and his brother reunited with their mother in North Carolina after three years apart when Ulrich's health collapsed, Los Angeles Magazine reported. Ten years old at the time, he went through five bouts of pneumonia, per The New York Times. Doctors decided to take a closer look, and they found that Ulrich had a cleft mitral valve.
Per Orphanet, a cleft mitral valve is a rare deformation of one of the heart valves that pumps blood through the heart. According to The Texas Heart Institute Journal, the cleft can cause blood to regurgitate in the wrong direction. On top of that, Ulrich also had a hole in the wall of his heart, a condition known as a ventricular septal defect. Both conditions often require corrective surgery, and for Ulrich, that meant undergoing an open heart procedure at 10.
"You can't get more rock-bottom than that," he told The New York Times years later, "being in a tremendous amount of pain and on morphine, people dying around you, and you can see your family behind this barrier that keeps them out of the ICU." In an Instagram post containing a graphic photo of his surgery, Ulrich said that he was given a 25% chance of living through the procedure. The operation left him with a long scar and a wire ball in his sternum that is painful when touched. Ulrich uses it sometimes in his acting.