Emilio Estevez

Early life

Emilio Estevez came into the world as the oldest child of artist Janet Sheen and actor Martin Sheen, whose legal name is Ramón Estévez. His siblings include Ramon Estevez, Charlie Sheen (born Carlos Estévez), and Renée Estevez. His father’s parents were immigrants from Ireland and Spain. Martin Sheen is a devout Catholic, while Janet Sheen is a strict Southern Baptist.

Estevez started school in New York City’s public system but moved to a private academy once his father’s acting career took off. The family lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side until 1968, when Martin Sheen landed a role in Catch-22 and they relocated west. Estevez grew up in Malibu, California, and attended Santa Monica High School. When he was 11, his father bought a portable movie camera for the family.

Estevez appeared in Meet Mr. Bomb, a short anti-nuclear film made at his high school. At age 14, he went with his father to the Philippines, where Sheen was filming Apocalypse Now; Estevez worked as an extra, but his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Back in Los Angeles, he co-wrote and starred in a high school play about Vietnam veterans called Echoes of an Era. After graduating from Santa Monica High School in 1980, he skipped college and pursued acting.

Unlike his brother Charlie, Estevez never took his father’s stage name. He liked the alliteration of the double E initials and didn’t want to coast into the business as Martin Sheen’s son. Later, he said he was proud of his Spanish heritage and glad he never adopted a stage name, following advice from his father, who regretted using the name Martin Sheen instead of his birth name, Ramón Estévez.

Career

Estevez got his start in a drama put on by the Catholic Paulist order. Not long after, he shared the stage with his father for the first time in a production of Mister Roberts at Burt Reynolds’ dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida—the only job his dad ever set up for him. The two later reunited for the 1982 ABC-TV movie In the Custody of Strangers, a film about teenagers in jail, where Estevez handled the casting. He became a major figure in the 1980s as a member of the Brat Pack, often seen as its leader.

One of his early big breaks was playing Keith “Two-Bit” Mathews in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film The Outsiders, alongside a cast that included Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, and others. He also bought the rights to S.E. Hinton’s That Was Then, This Is Now and wrote the screenplay himself. After The Outsiders, he played punk-rocker Otto Maddox in Repo Man, then appeared in The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. He later starred in That Was Then...

This Is Now, the horror movie Maximum Overdrive (which earned him a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actor), and the crime film Wisdom. Estevez was originally set to play Private Chris Taylor in Platoon, but a two-year production delay forced him out, and his younger brother Charlie Sheen took the part. He went on to lead roles in Stakeout, Young Guns, and Young Guns II. In the early 1990s, he directed, wrote, and starred alongside his brother in the garbage-man comedy Men at Work.

He later remarked that while people told him it was the funniest movie they’d ever seen, he had to wonder how many movies those people had actually watched.

Personal life

In the early eighties, Emilio Estevez was romantically linked to actress Mimi Rogers. He then had an on-again, off-again relationship with Wilhelmina model Carey Salley, with whom he shares a son and a daughter. This overlapped with his engagement to Demi Moore, a relationship that came and went between 1984 and 1986. In 1986, Salley sued Estevez for $2 million in a paternity case; he formally accepted paternity of their children on June 1, 1987. He married Paula Abdul, a singer and choreographer, on April 29, 1992, but they filed for divorce two years later. Abdul later explained the split came because she wanted kids, while Estevez—already a father of two—did not. In 2011, Estevez described his religion as a work in progress. By 2023, he reflected that film is an illusion, fame is fleeting, but faith and family last.