Heather Thomas experienced the dark side of Hollywood after her time on “The Fall Guy.”
Thomas revealed on the “Still Here Hollywood” podcast that after her time on the hit show, she was bombarded with scary situations involving stalkers.
Thomas was on “The Fall Guy” from 1981 until the series concluded in 1986. She took on a few other roles after the show ended, such as “Red Blooded American Girl” and “Against The Law,” but she decided to leave Hollywood behind in the ’90s.
“I was just getting so many stalkers,” she said before explaining that it was “really bad.” It got to the point where Thomas was dealing with two stalkers a week, she told podcast host Steve Kmetko.
“I had tons of restraining orders. I had two little girls, and a guy was 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,” Thomas said.
She described her experience as being “scary” and even received some threatening items in the mail. “Someone sent me a box of bullets, and people would send me funeral wreaths they stole from a graveyard,” the actress shared.
Thomas continued, “I always had a bodyguard in the house because that’s where I didn’t want to come home to a dark house.”
She explained that things turned violent when a man attempted to break into her bedroom. “I had one guy one night cut my screen in my bedroom and got in, and I shot him,” she said while clarifying that she had rock salt in her firearm. Thomas is still unsure if the intruder ever went to jail.
Thomas said that she has not been open about her stalkers in the past because she did not want to be labeled as “the lady that was stalked.” During the podcast episode, Thomas also discussed being sexualized in Hollywood.
“I think there’s a certain amount of disassociation,” she said of the industry. “It was really my business. It would be like a woman who sold bathing suits. It was the way I sold things.”
Thomas said she was “happy” with her body because she “worked hard” for it. When Thomas made her debut in Hollywood, she was a student at UCLA and wanted to focus on writing and directing, but she quickly learned it was “rough” for women.
She ultimately chose to be on-camera as opposed to being behind-the-scenes because of the paycheck. Thomas said she was “making so much money” that she chose the path of “least resistance.”
