Stephen Hibbert, a writer and actor who went from the Groundlings to writing for “Late Night With David Letterman” and “Mad TV” to a cult role as the Gimp in “Pulp Fiction,” died March 2 in Denver, Colorado. He was 68.
Family members confirmed the death to Rolling Stone and Fox News Digital and said the death occurred after a heart attack. In a statement given to TMZ, his three children, Ronnie, Rosalind and Greg, said, “Our father, Stephen Hibbert, passed away unexpectedly this week. His life was full of love and dedication to the arts and his family. He will be dearly missed by many.”
While Hibbert had a long career of writing for and appearing in television comedy shows and films — from writing credits on “Boy Meets World” to “Animaniacs” to small roles in an “Austin Powers” film and “True Jackson, VP” — he was best known to film fans for playing the Gimp in his friend Quentin Tarantino‘s “Pulp Fiction.” It was a part that required him to neither speak nor show his face on screen, but which was nonetheless taxing for the many hours spent on-set in a full-body leather suit.
“I’m absolutely stunned to hear that Stephen Hibbert, the gentleman who played the Gimp in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ has passed away,” said “Pulp Fiction” co-writer Roger Avary on X. “Eli Roth and I were just with him at Days of the Dead Atlanta. He was at the table next to me and was genuinely a wonderful fellow. He took my role as The Gimp when I decided that Quentin was going to punk me and lock me in that box over lunch with a ball gag in my mouth. So Stephen stepped in and truly breathed life into that latex-covered character. I’m saddened by his passing but glad to have gotten to know him, and to call him a friend.”
Hibbert told interviews that he enjoyed the unusual notoriety — including the fact that there was an action figure of the Gimp for his kids to enjoy — and he made regular appearances at entertainment memorabilia conventions to greet fans.
I’m absolutely stunned to hear that Stephen Hibbert, the gentleman who played the Gimp in Pulp Fiction has passed away. Eli Roth and I were just with him at Days of the Dead Atlanta. He was at the table next to me and was genuinely a wonderful fellow. He took my role as The Gimp… pic.twitter.com/ntPmu04SOi
— Roger Avary (@AVARY) March 7, 2026
“I think it’s one of the greatest films of all time,” he told AARP’s Tim Appelo in a 2024 profile. “I saw it again recently, and I had forgotten how funny it was, and what a great time capsule it is of Los Angeles in the early ’90s. … I’ve done a number of really fun fan fests, screenings and conventions, and I always have a blast! Hanging out with films nerds for three days? Yes, please! Lots of people are taken aback by the fact I’m such a family man, I guess. A straight guy busily cobbling together a writing career in TV and film comedies.”
Hibbert wrote for shows including “Boy Meets World,” “Tiny Toons Adventures,” “Animaniacs,” “Howie Mandel’s Sunny Skies,” “Random Play” and “The MTV Movie Awards,” along with uncredited punch-ups on a number of feature films. He was said to also have contributed as a writer on “Saturday Night Live.”
His acting roles included appearances in “The Cat in the Hat,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” “Dr. Ken,” “Rush Hour,” “True Jackson, VP,” “Twenty Good Years,” “Jericho” and “Just Shoot Me.”
At the time of “Pulp Fiction,” Hibbert was married to another of the film’s stars, Julia Sweeney. The two of them co-wrote the “It’s Pat!” movie, adapting the long-running “SNL” sketch, on which Tarantino did an uncredited rewrite. The buddyship with Tarantino dated back to Hibbert and Sweeney’s mutual time in the Groundlings, leading to the “Pulp” casting. Hibbert said Tarantino “would guest with the improv show on Thursday nights. He was pretty much the same then as now, hilarious, endlessly curious and passionate about film.”
Of his friendship with Tarantino, Hibbert said, “We were basically moviegoing geeks. We would go to the New Beverly Cinema [decades before the filmmaker purchased it] and see a screening of ‘Stagecoach’ or something. And at one point during the pre-production of ‘Pulp Fiction,’ he had given me the script to read… ‘Why don’t you come down and [read] for the Gimp part. He knew I was an improviser and an actor as well as a friend and writer.” In the audition, “He played my master, in a bizarre S&M triangle … We acted out this little scene where he ordered me around… By the time I got home — this is in the old days in 1993 —there was a message on the machine: ‘Hey, you got the part. Let’s do it.’ It was a three-day shoot and it was amazing to work with those actors, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Duane Whitaker and Peter Greene.” [Greene died in December 2025.]
Hibbert further quipped o his audition for the casting director with Tarantino: “He bossed me around the office and I groveled. I felt like I’d been training all of my work life for an opportunity to audition for a role like that.”
He continued, “It was a very arduous shoot, because it was a very grim theme, and I was wrapped up in this leather outfit from head to toe. And they wanted me to be a little puffier, so I wore a little mini-fat suit underneath it. Under all the hot lights, with the leather and the fat suit, I lost about 10, 15 pounds over the course of the three-day shoot. And thank God there was a little shower in my little trailer dressing room, because I would just shower afterwards for half an hour.
“I remember at the end of the three-day shoot, Bruce Willis had everyone come over to his swanky, personalized, cool, custom-built trailer, and we all had gin as the sun was going down on a beautiful Southern California evening in Culver City. We’re all just going, ‘Oh man, people are going to just freak out over the scene’ — we were all like little boys, proud of being so naughty and fun. Everyone was at the top of their game, and I still get a warm glow, remembering that day.”
Hibbert had a solution to the mystery of the character: “I played the scene as if the creeps who kept him had cut out his tongue. Quentin really liked that idea. The Gimp had been a prisoner there for a while. So he liked being in that situation, there was a Stockholm syndrome thing happening for the Gimp. Which is why I played it sort of giddy, pointing leeringly at Butch and prancing about. I think if I had played it all sullen and menacing, it wouldn’t have been as creepy.”
Stephen Hibbert attends The Hollywood Autograph Show held at The Westin Los Angeles Airport on February 2, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.
Getty Images
HIbbert was born in Fleetwood, England, and his family emigrated to Tustin, Calif., when he was 6; a committed Anglophile, he still maintained close ties with and liked to visit his mother’s side of the family in the U.K.
His big break as a writer came with a 1984-86 stint on “Late Night With David Letterman.” From there he worked largely in animation before landing gigs with “Howie Mandel’s Sunny Skies,” “Mad TV” and “Boy Meets World” in the mid- and late ’90s.
Whether writing for sitcoms or animation, Hibbert said he held to the same character-driven principles: “It really doesn’t matter if it’s character in a one-off sketch, characters we know so well in a sit-com or animated little, bouncy things – stay true to them and everything generally works out.”
Hibbert’s first on-screen appearance was in 1987 as “student #3” on “Newhart,” where, just as much as he was excited to meet Bob Newhart, he was equally thrilled to meet the episode’s “actual guest star,” William Windom, whose series “My World and Welcome to It” had been one of his favorite series as a kid, he said.
Although “It’s Pat: The Movie” is generally considered ill-fated as “SNL” spinoffs go, Hibbert held fond memories of it. “Julia and I were married and writing partners, at the time, and Fox approached us to write a movie for Julia’s very popular ‘(at the time) ‘SNL character, “Pat,’” he told the website Trainwreck’d Society in a 2014 interview. “The film ended up at Disney. While the film didn’t turn out as well as any of us would have liked, I still think there are some wonderful performances: Julia’s, Dave Foley’s, Charlie Rocket, and there are lots of truly funny jokes and scenes. So I’m actually pretty proud of much of the movie, and think it’s fair to say it’s better than you remember it, that is in the unlikely event you’ve actually seen it.”
When not writing or acting, Hibbert did stints sharing his love of Hollywood lore with the public. “I’m a huge cinema buff, so I took a little part-time job as a tour guide with this tour company in Hollywood, and I just loved it… It wasn’t a movie stars homes tour… I got to share my knowledge of Hollywood history and L.A. history in general as we busted down Sunset Blvd. and Hollywood Blvd. and all of these famous places.”
His role as the Gimp, of course, gave him automatic status any time it came up in conversation. But he quickly learned he had to take measures to keep a certain kind of fan at bay. “The weekend ‘Pulp’ opened, I was visiting my mom and dad in San Juan Capistrano. When I got home, there were two dozen messages on my answering machine, almost all from guys telling me they really enjoyed my performance and would I like to meet them for coffee? Yikes! These fellas had to wait for the end credits to see who played the Gimp, then find a pay phone, call L.A. 411 and snag my number. I quickly changed my number and became unlisted.”
His proudest credit was not actually as the Gimp, but as a volunteer tutor and tutor coordinator with School on Wheels.
“It was fun hanging out with Mike Myers working on ‘Austin Powers’ or something, but the stuff that is really remarkable and that I am proud of, besides my three amazing kids, is working with School on Wheels,” he said in a podcast interview. School on Wheels is a nonprofit “where tutors work with homeless kids wherever they happen to be… Unfortunately, it’s an invisible population… But I worked one-on-one with about five dozen or more kids over the course of six years, and I can say, without exception, all of them were remarkable people… iI’s a bit of a cliche, but it’s true, kids are remarkably resilient.”
Hibbert moved to Denver in the late 2010s and described himself as “semi-retired” from show business after the move. In Colorado, he taught improv and sketch writing at the Bovine Metropolis Theater in downtown Denver, and most recently was teaching at the Denver School of the Arts.
“I feel very fortunate to have cobbled together a three-decade-long-plus career in show business,” he told North Palm Beach Life in 2021. “It’s an incredibly difficult trench to try to furrow, and I feel lucky that I made a living, and that I have a pension from it now… I just want to publicly state how grateful I am for all the wonderful people I met and worked with, many of whom are still a part of my life.”
Asked by AARP in 2024 if he had any advice for his younger self, he said, “My advice to my younger self: “Trust yourself more — no one really knows what they’re doing — and go to the dentist every year for a checkup.”
Hibbert was known among his show-biz colleagues for his joviality as well as appreciation of many different arts. On social media, his varied interests were evident in his frequent postings of photos of glamorous screen sirens from the golden age of Hollywood as well as classic fine-arts paintings. His Facebook profile quote was from Wordsmith: “The best bits of life are the little, unremembered, nameless acts of kindness and love.”
His last Facebook post, on March 1, was of a lovely, dusk-set Ukrainian painting — “Sunset at the Lake,” by Serhii Vasylkivskyy, from 1900 — with the caption: “Wishing all a peaceful evening.”
Hibbert is survived by his former wives Sweeney and Alicia Agos, and his three children with Agos, Ronnie, Rosalind and Greg.