Lou Diamond Phillips Says He ‘Dropped 25 lbs.’ and Altered His Face to Portray Serial Killer Richard Ramirez in “The Night Stalker”

Cara Lynn ShultzFri, August 21, 2026 at 6:47 PM UTC

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Lou Diamond Philips in New York City on March 23, 2026; and in the 2016 film ‘The Night Stalker’Credit: Kristina Bumphrey/Variety via Getty; Michael Clifford/Lifetime Movie Network/Courtesy Everett -

Lou Diamond Phillips lost 25 lbs. and altered his appearance to portray serial killer Richard Ramirez in The Night Stalker

Phillips studied Ramirez’s behavior, including his lack of empathy, to better understand the mindset of the psychopath

He abandoned his Method acting experiment after being recognized while walking through a neighborhood in a hoodie

Lou Diamond Phillips is sharing the lengths he went to when he portrayed serial killer Richard Ramirez in the 2016 thriller The Night Stalker.

“It was a deep dive in transformation,” the La Bamba actor, 64, told Elisa Donovan on an episode of the Killer Thrillerpodcast released on Thursday, Aug. 24. “I dropped, like, 25 lbs. because I was playing him at the end of his life when he died of lymphoma.”

“We actually did pull my eyes back a little bit,” he explained, “because he had that sort of coyote [look].”

Lou Diamond Phillips in Los Angeles in 2026Credit: Michael Tullberg/Getty

“I was going to ask you that, because I feel like it did look like your face looked different,” Donovan said.

“He had, you know, narrow eyes — more like a coyote eye. And we did the thing where you pulled them back and changed the shape of my eye,” Phillips explained. “I was losing the weight [so it] changed the shape of my cheekbones and everything else.”

“He had those really pronounced cheekbones,” Phillips said of the serial killer, who murdered at least 13 people in the Los Angeles area from 1984 to 1985.

Ramirez earned the nickname “The Night Stalker” because he would often enter homes through unlocked doors and open windows in the middle of the night, prowling neighborhoods in a hoodie. He was sentenced to death by gas chamber in 1989, but died of cancer in 2013 at age 53.

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Phillips also shared that he tried to get into the mindset of Ramirez, someone he called “a true psychopath.”

“What it took to get inside his head … I mean, he’s a really, really chilling guy,” he explained. “That was the thing … we all if we see a child suffering, if we see an animal suffering, those of us, with a healthy emotional life, feel bad. We feel sympathy. And he was incapable of that.”

The Chair Company actor then recalled that once he took the role, “I was just going to walk around for a while and if the windows were open, I was going to look into him from the street.”

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“That’s sort of what he did ... like he was browsing in the produce section trying to figure out which apples he wanted,” The Masked Singer alum recalled. “I parked in a neighborhood that wasn’t mine, had the hoodie, was going to walk up and down the streets and I passed a guy, you know, who was walking his dog. And as I passed him, he went, ‘Hey, Lou Diamond! Love your work.’ ”

“I can’t get away with this,” Phillips said of his attempt. “I abandoned that plan.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”