There are actors who chase fame, and there are actors who simply inhabit every room they walk into. Robert Carradine, born March 24, 1954, in Hollywood, California, belonged to the second kind. The son of veteran character actor John Carradine and younger half-brother of David Carradine, he grew up in one of the most storied acting families in American cinema history. He made his screen debut at just 18, standing next to John Wayne.
By the time he was 30, he had already worked with Martin Scorsese, directed by Hal Ashby, and given a performance that would define an entire generation’s understanding of what it meant to be an outsider.
The best Robert Carradine movies are cultural documents that capture something real about the eras in which they were made. From dusty Westerns to anti-war dramas, from campus comedies to outlaw epics, Robert Carradine best films span a range that most actors never attempt.
This list ranks 5 of his most essential works, chosen because they matter, to cinema history, to audiences, and to the Carradine legacy itself.
Who is Robert Carradine?
Robert Carradine arrived on screen at a time when Hollywood was reinventing itself. The New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, rough, morally ambiguous, visually daring, was the water he swam in from the start, and it shaped everything about the way he approached his craft.
His first film credit was The Cowboys (1972), a Western starring John Wayne. He was eighteen years old. That kind of debut either breaks a young actor or builds the kind of confidence that lasts decades.
For Carradine, it built. He followed it almost immediately with a small but unforgettable appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), slipping into the New Hollywood world of street-level tension and moral complexity as if he’d been born there, which, in a sense, he had.
Through the mid-to-late 1970s, he moved between genres with a natural ease that many more celebrated actors never manage. He appeared in Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), an Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama that stands as one of the most emotionally devastating American films of its decade. In 1980, he co-starred alongside his brothers David and Keith in Walter Hill’s The Long Riders, one of cinema’s most unusual and authentic ensemble casting experiments.
Then came 1984, and Lewis Skolnick. Robert Carradine Revenge of the Nerds introduced him to a completely different audience, a mass, mainstream, pop-culture audience — and the film’s success transformed him into something he had perhaps not planned for: a cult icon. Robert Carradine TV shows would follow, most notably the Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire (2001–2004), where he played Sam McGuire across more than 60 episodes, and the TBS reality competition King of the Nerds (2013–2015), which he co-hosted with Revenge of the Nerds co-star Curtis Armstrong.
His Robert Carradine movies and TV shows catalog spans more than 50 years and over 150 credits. That is not the career of a man coasting on a family name. That is the work of someone who genuinely loved the job.
How We Chose the Best Robert Carradine Movies
This is not a robert carradine movies list assembled by algorithm. These five films were selected based on four distinct criteria, each of which tells a different story about why Carradine’s body of work deserves careful attention.
- Cultural impact – Some films ripple outward long after their release dates. They change how audiences see certain types of stories, certain types of characters. The films on this list did that.
- Audience ratings and critic reception – Box office numbers matter, but so do the long-tail reactions: the retrospective reviews, the fan communities, the academic essays. Revenge of the Nerds, for instance, earned $40 million on a budget of approximately $8 million and holds a 71% critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Coming Home earned eight Academy Award nominations and won three. These are not minor footnotes.
- Genre diversity – A Robert Carradine filmography that only showed one kind of movie would be an incomplete one. Western, war drama, crime film, cult comedy: each genre is represented here because each reveals a different dimension of what he could do.
- Career milestones – Every film on this list marks a turning point, either in Carradine’s own trajectory or in the broader story of American cinema during the periods when he was most active.
1. Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
The Role That Defined a Generation
There is a version of this story where Revenge of the Nerds is just another raunchy 1980s campus comedy, a lesser Animal House, a pale imitation of the genre it was imitating. That version is wrong. Directed by Jeff Kanew and released on July 20, 1984, the film opened in just 364 theaters because its producers were genuinely unsure whether mainstream audiences would respond to a film whose protagonists were openly labeled social outcasts.
They responded. Robert Carradine Revenge of the Nerds grossed over $40 million domestically against a production budget of roughly $8 million.
Robert Carradine played Lewis Skolnick, a bespectacled, earnest computer science freshman who arrives at the fictional Adams College expecting to thrive and immediately finds himself cast out. The Alpha Beta fraternity burns down their own house and takes over the freshman dorms. Lewis and his fellow nerds are forced to live in the gymnasium. What follows is a film about dignity, about the right to occupy space, to be taken seriously, to fight back without becoming the thing you hate.
To prepare for the role, Carradine spent two weeks living on the University of Arizona campus before filming began, participating in fraternity rush as if he were a real student. That level of commitment shows.
Lewis Skolnick does not feel like a performance; he feels like a person. The character’s combination of vulnerability, intelligence, and unexpected backbone gave the film a moral center that its surface-level raunchiness occasionally obscured.
The film holds a 71% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and landed at number 91 on Bravo’s list of the 100 Funniest Movies. Carradine reprised the role in three sequels and later became executive producer on the latter two.
The film’s cultural reach extended further still: in 2006, an actual Lambda Lambda Lambda fraternity chapter was founded at the University of Connecticut, inspired directly by the movie. Robert Carradine Revenge of the Nerds is the kind of film that generates real-world institutions, and that does not happen by accident.
2. The Cowboys (1972)
Robert Carradine’s Powerful Film Debut
John Wayne was 64 years old when The Cowboys was filmed, and he carried the project with the weathered authority of a man who had been making Westerns since before most of his cast was born. Robert Carradine was 18.
That gap, generational, experiential, physical, is part of what makes the film work. Robert Carradine The Cowboys is, on one level, a story about the transfer of knowledge across generations. On another level, it is a story about what happens when that transfer is violently interrupted.
Robert Carradine western movies don’t get a more significant starting point than this. The film follows Wil Andersen, a rancher forced by circumstances to hire a group of schoolboys, ranging in age from 9 to 15, to help drive his cattle from Montana to Belle Fourche. Carradine plays one of the older boys in the group, holding his own in scenes alongside one of Hollywood’s most commanding presences.
Director Mark Rydell shot the film on location in New Mexico and Colorado, and the landscape gives the whole production a physical authenticity that studio-shot Westerns of the same era couldn’t match.
The film is significant for robert carradine filmography scholars because it established something early: Carradine could share a frame with legends and not disappear. He was not overshadowed. He absorbed what the experience offered and built on it. His television debut had come the previous year, with an appearance on Bonanza in 1971, but The Cowboys is where his career as a film actor truly began, and it began in the best possible classroom.
3. Mean Streets (1973)
A Small Role in a Legendary Film
Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets arrived in 1973 as something the American film industry hadn’t quite seen before: a street-level portrait of guilt, loyalty, and violence in New York’s Little Italy, shot with the nervous energy of a documentary and the moral seriousness of a confessional.
It launched Harvey Keitel into serious contention as one of his generation’s most compelling performers. It introduced Robert De Niro to the wider world. And somewhere in its charged, unstable atmosphere, a young Robert Carradine appeared as a killer.
Robert Carradine Mean Streets is a small role, but its placement within this particular film makes it historically significant. The scene involves Carradine’s character shooting dead a character played by his own brother, David Carradine, a moment of genuine strangeness that Scorsese handled with his characteristic matter-of-fact brutality.
For Robert, still just 19 at the time, the credit represented access to a world of filmmaking that was rewriting the rules: New Hollywood at its most concentrated, its most combustible.
Robert Carradine Mean Streets is not a supporting performance in the traditional sense, he appears only briefly, but his presence in a Scorsese film at that particular moment in cinema history speaks to the trajectory he was on. He was not being cast in the margins of American cinema. He was being cast in its center.
4. The Long Riders (1980)
Acting Alongside the Carradine Family Legacy
Walter Hill’s The Long Riders is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most inventive pieces of casting in the history of Hollywood Westerns. The film dramatizes the lives of the James-Younger outlaw gang, and Hill made the decision to cast actual brothers in the roles of the brother pairs at the gang’s core.
Robert, David, and Keith Carradine played the Younger brothers, Cole, Jim, and Bob. James and Stacy Keach played Jesse and Frank James. Dennis and Randy Quaid played Ed and Clell Miller. Christopher and Nicholas Guest played Charley and Robert Ford.
The result is a film that carries a kind of authenticity that no amount of rehearsal or direction could manufacture. The chemistry between the Carradine brothers onscreen is not performed, it is lived. Robert Carradine movies and TV shows contain many strong performances, but this one has a particular texture that comes from genuine familiarity, genuine history, the kind of ease that only exists between people who actually know each other.
The film itself is a serious piece of work. Hill shoots the violence with a graphic realism that owed a debt to Sam Peckinpah without simply imitating him, and the screenplay gives each outlaw enough individuality that the ensemble never collapses into a blur. The Younger brothers’ scenes, in particular, have a warmth that makes the film’s tragic trajectory all the more effective.
Robert Carradine best films include this one not just because of what it achieves cinematically, but because of what it means within the broader Carradine family story, a story that runs through more than a century of American screen acting.
5. Coming Home (1978)
A Critically Acclaimed War Drama
Hal Ashby’s Coming Home is one of the great American films of the 1970s. It earned eight Academy Award nominations at the 51st Academy Awards ceremony, winning three, Best Actor for Jon Voight, Best Actress for Jane Fonda, and Best Original Screenplay. It grossed $36 million worldwide against a production budget of approximately $3 million. At the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, Voight won the Best Actor Prize. These are not statistics that belong to a minor film.
Robert Carradine plays Bill Munson, the traumatized younger brother of Vi Munson (Penelope Milford), a patient at the Veterans’ Administration hospital where much of the film’s emotional reckoning takes place. The role is not large in terms of screen time, but it is large in terms of what it contributes to the film’s overall emotional architecture.
Bill represents the damage that war does to the people who survive it, not the heroic damage of combat, but the quieter, more persistent damage of a mind that cannot find its way back to a functioning reality. Carradine plays him without sentimentality, which is exactly right. Sentimentality would have softened what the film is trying to say.
At the time of the film’s release, some observers suggested that Carradine’s performance might mark him as the strongest actor in his family. That is a bold claim in a family that included his brother David, his father John, and his brother Keith, who had already received an Academy Award nomination for Nashville (1975).
Whether or not the claim holds up under scrutiny, it reflects the seriousness with which Coming Home was received, and the seriousness with which Carradine committed to his role within it.
Coming Home is also included on the AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Passions list of the greatest love stories in American cinema history. That Robert Carradine played even a supporting role in a film of that stature speaks to the quality of the company he kept in his best work.
Why Robert Carradine Became a Cult Favorite Actor
The phrase “cult favorite” can sometimes function as a polite way of saying that an actor never quite broke through to the top tier of Hollywood stardom. In Carradine’s case, it means something different. It means that the audiences who found his work tended to hold onto it with unusual intensity.
Part of this has to do with the Lewis Skolnick effect. The character of the brilliant but socially marginal nerd, played with enough humanity to avoid becoming a caricature, spoke directly to generations of viewers who had experienced some version of that exclusion themselves. The Robert Carradine Revenge of the Nerds franchise gave those viewers a mirror, and that kind of identification creates loyalty that persists long after a film leaves theaters.
But Carradine’s cult status is also rooted in something subtler: his consistent willingness to play character roles rather than leading-man roles, to be part of an ensemble rather than the center of it. This is a choice, not a limitation. His work in The Long Riders, Coming Home, and Mean Streets demonstrates that he was capable of handling significant dramatic material.
He simply did not confine himself to it. The range that runs through robert carradine filmography, from Westerns to war films, from Scorsese crime pictures to Disney Channel family comedies, reflects an actor who was more interested in the work itself than in managing a particular image.
The Carradine acting dynasty also deserves context here. His father John Carradine appeared in over 300 films, including multiple John Ford Westerns and Dracula (1936). His brother David achieved global recognition through Kung Fu (1972–1975) and later Kill Bill (2003–2004).
His brother Keith earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975). Robert’s daughter Ever Carradine has built her own substantial career, appearing in The Handmaid’s Tale and Commander in Chief. It is one of the rare acting families where talent appears across generations rather than concentrating in one.
Within that context, Robert’s decision to co-host a TBS reality competition about nerd culture, King of the Nerds ran for three seasons from 2013 to 2015, is not a step down. It is consistent with everything he had always been: approachable, self-aware, and more interested in connecting with an audience than in protecting a cinematic reputation.
Where to Watch Robert Carradine Movies Today
Robert Carradine movies and TV shows are spread across multiple platforms, with availability varying by region.
Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is periodically available on streaming services including Tubi and Pluto TV in the United States, where it rotates in and out of availability. Physical media, DVD and Blu-ray, released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, remains the most reliable access point.
Coming Home (1978) has been released on DVD and is typically available for digital rental or purchase through Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Vudu. Given the film’s Oscar pedigree and the continuing relevance of its subject matter, it appears regularly on curated streaming platforms focused on classic American cinema.
The Long Riders (1980) is available through various digital rental platforms, including Amazon and Apple TV. It is also sometimes accessible through the Criterion Channel, which has shown interest in Walter Hill’s work.
The Cowboys (1972) is available for digital rental across major platforms and occasionally appears on TCM (Turner Classic Movies), which has long championed the film as a significant late-period John Wayne work.
Mean Streets (1973) is widely available, both as a physical release and through digital platforms. Given the film’s status as a landmark of American cinema, it is rarely difficult to find.
For newcomers to Robert Carradine best films, the recommended entry point is Revenge of the Nerds, not because it is the most cinematic achievement on this list, but because it is the most accessible and the most fun. From there, Coming Home represents a significant tonal shift that reveals an entirely different dimension of what Carradine could do.
The Long Riders works best for viewers who already have some familiarity with the Western genre and with the specific history of the James-Younger Gang. Mean Streets is essential viewing for anyone interested in the New Hollywood movement, with or without Carradine’s particular role in it.
Final Thoughts
Robert Carradine passed away on February 23, 2026, at the age of 71. He had battled bipolar disorder for nearly two decades. His family’s statement described him as “a beacon of light to everyone around him,” and that phrase, however grief-stricken, captures something real about how audiences responded to him across a career that spanned more than 5 decades and 150 credits.
For anyone new to his work, start with Revenge of the Nerds. Then work backwards and outwards. What you’ll find, robert carradine movie by robert carradine movie, is the filmography of a man who spent his career doing exactly what he loved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Robert Carradine?
Robert Carradine is an American actor born on March 24, 1954, in Hollywood, California. The son of actor John Carradine and younger half-brother of David Carradine, he built a career spanning over 50 years and 150+ screen credits across film and television.
What is Robert Carradine most famous for?
He is best known for playing Lewis Skolnick in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), a role that earned him cult icon status. He also co-hosted the TBS reality series King of the Nerds from 2013 to 2015.
What was Robert Carradine’s first movie?
His film debut was The Cowboys (1972), a Western starring John Wayne. He was just 18 years old at the time.
Did Robert Carradine win any awards?
While he did not win major individual awards, he appeared in Coming Home (1978), which won three Academy Awards including Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Original Screenplay.
Is Robert Carradine related to David Carradine?
Yes. David Carradine was his older half-brother. Their father, John Carradine, was one of Hollywood’s most prolific character actors with over 300 film appearances.
Where can I watch Robert Carradine movies?
His films are available across platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu, Tubi, and Pluto TV. Mean Streets and Coming Home are also available on physical media and occasionally stream on TCM and the Criterion Channel.
How many movies did Robert Carradine make?
Robert Carradine appeared in well over 100 film and television productions throughout his career, making him one of the most consistently working character actors of his generation.
