The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas Ultimately Left Hollywood in the '90s Because of Stalkers — One of Whom She Even Shot

Heather Thomas found stardom on The Fall Guy, but it had a real downside.

On the March 17 episode of the Still Here Hollywood podcast with Steve Kmetko, Thomas, 67, opened up about why she ended up leaving Hollywood not long after her hit ‘80s TV show The Fall Guy ended, because she was overwhelmed and afraid as she handled multiple stalkers.

The Fall Guy — in which Thomas and Lee Majors played Hollywood stunt people who end up solving crimes — ran from 1981 to 1986. Thomas continued to work after the show ended, appearing on TV and in movies like 1990’s Red Blooded American Girl and 1997’s Against the Law.

But by the mid-'90s, she said, “I was just getting so many stalkers.” She said it was “really bad,” and had to deal with “at least two a week.”

“I had tons of restraining orders,” she said. “I had two little girls, and a guy's jumping our gate with a giant buck knife. In those days, I don't know if this is true now, but people would fixate. You could be in a soap commercial, and they would fixate on you.”

“There weren't a lot of stalker laws, and I just needed to be home anyway,” she said of the time. Her experiences with stalkers were “scary.” She remembered, “Someone sent me a box of bullets, and people would send me funeral wreaths they stole from a graveyard.”

“I always had a bodyguard in the house because that's where I didn't want to come home to a dark house,” she said.

But in one particularly harrowing incident, “I had one guy one night cut my screen in my bedroom and got in, and I shot him,” she said, noting that she had rock salt in her gun. She told Kmetko that she didn’t know if the man ever went to jail.

The stalking still went on for a few years after she left the business. Thomas said she doesn’t often speak about the stalking she endured because she doesn’t want to be “the lady that was stalked.” She said that she also decided to leave the business so she could be home more often for her kids, who, she said “didn’t know much” about the stalking at the time.

Thomas said that in more recent years she has returned to acting. In 2024, she and Majors, 85, cameoed in the film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt and inspired by their original TV series. 

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Thomas also opened up on the podcast about how she was sexualized by Hollywood in the 1980s. “I think there's a certain amount of disassociation,” she explained. She looked at it as part of her “business.” “It was a way I sold things,” she explained. Plus, she was “happy” with her body and “worked hard.” 

Still, when she first started working in the business as a student at UCLA, she was focused on writing and directing, but it was “rough” for women. She was “making so much money” as an actress that she “went with the flow of least resistance” and chose acting over behind-the-scenes work, she added.