[Interview] Tom Jones Jr. Talks Playing Dr. Loomis in ‘Halloween Kills’, ‘Trick or Treat’, and More
In a club even more exclusive than that of those who have portrayed Michael Myers on screen, Tom Jones Jr. is one of only three men to ever play the iconic role of Dr. Sam Loomis on film, but as Jones told us recently, his memorable appearance in front of the camera in Halloween Kills came after almost 40 years behind the camera, building the sets of many of our favorite movies, from Trick or Treat and The Abyss to the 2018 Halloween requel, and many more.
“I had a background in residential and commercial construction leading up to the start of the industry here in Wilmington (North Carolina),” Jones tells HDN. “Dino De Laurentiis, who was an Italian producer, came here and made Firestarter in 1983.”
Following the release of Firestarter, De Laurentiis built what would eventually grow into a 10-stage full-service movie production studio located in Wilmington, kickstarting the region’s first real filmmaking community, where everything from The Crow to Scream (2022) has been shot in the four decades since, including Halloween Kills, for which Jones served as construction coordinator, overseeing the recreation of 1978 Haddonfield and the Myers House itself, just as he had done for its predecessor, 2018’s Halloween.
Jones reveals that he was actually cast to play Dr. Loomis during pre-production of Halloween (2018), when an early draft of the script at that time included a flashback to the events of 1978.
“We were still working with the original script,” he recalls. “Our very first department heads meeting, we’re sitting in a conference room, and all the important people were at a table, and the rest of us were on the perimeter just in folding chairs. They’re going through scenarios and schedules, and so forth and so on, and the first A.D. (Atilla Salih Yücer) leans forward and he looks down, and he says, ‘Hey’.
“I said, ‘Me?’ He says, ‘Yeah. Take your glasses off’. So I took my glasses off. He says, ‘Give me a look’. So I gave him sort of the stare. He punched David (Gordon Green) and says, ‘We’ve got our Loomis right here’. So David said, ‘Yeah, works for me’. That’s where the plan was hatched.Â
“Subsequently, they wrote that scene out of the script, but once the success of 2018 had come to fruition, they knew they had the horsepower to do their flashback sequence that they had wanted to do. Even though this wasn’t the same scene, it gave birth to a whole 15 minutes of 1978 Haddonfield. So when they came back to do Halloween Kills in Wilmington, to start prep, they just called me Loomis.”
In our video conversation last week, we also discussed Tom’s first job as construction foreman, the 1986 heavy metal Halloween horror movie Trick or Treat, as well as James Cameron’s seminal The Abyss, which he says was the toughest job of his career (and where he first met Dick Warlock, who was stunt coordinator), and he described the night he stepped into the role of Dr. Loomis, following the powerful performances of Donald Pleasance and Malcolm McDowell.
“It’s been forty years behind the camera and two hours in front of the camera,” Jones says of his remarkable career.
You can watch our full exclusive interview with Tom Jones Jr. below.
