Peter Billingsley is one of those rare celebrities that almost everyone learns to love from a young age. That’s because he played Ralphie in A Christmas Story, and because that movie is one that families watch each year around the holidays, generations of fans have grown up quoting Ralphie and showing the film to their own children.
Despite that early acting success, Billingsley didn’t appear in that many films later in life. Just what has he been up to? How has his career changed, and what prompted him to bring Ralphie back one last time? Keep reading to find out!
His acting career began early in life
Many actors get their start when they are very young. However, few start as early as Peter Billingsley did: in an interview with The Orlando Sentinel, he recalled being only 2.5 years old when he starred in a Geritol ad. Even then, his acting skills were quite solid, and he went on to star in more than 100 commercials.
For all his commercial success, it was Billingsley’s role in A Christmas Story that transformed him into a household name. But that didn’t happen overnight: as the star revealed to Buzzfeed, the movie didn’t generate major buzz at first, but it later became a phenomenon through television airings and VHS sales and rentals. “It was just a very odd, gradual fame,” he rsaid. “For better or worse, it didn’t hold me back, and it didn’t propel me.”
He witnessed the tragic Challenger explosion
Eventually, of course, Peter Billingsley became quite famous. This helped him later become a spokesperson for the Young Astronauts program at NASA. He helped to appeal to future astronauts, but on one fateful day in 1986, he had to watch several good astronauts lose their lives in a senseless tragedy.
Billingsley was invited to the doomed launch of the shuttle Challenger. In an interview with Today, he described how surreal it was: he was there to help host some parties, but the mood of everyone on the ground immediately changed as the tragedy unfolded. “The people that knew that something was wrong were in so much shock that they didn’t scream or anything,” he said. “They just were silent…Then we heard the words, ‘The vehicle has exploded.’ And with that, everybody went into trauma.”
A lifelong friendship with Vince Vaughn
Relatively early in life, Peter Billingsley knew that he would rather be a director than a movie star. However, in 1990, he made the time to star in a CBS afterschool special titled The Fourth Man. The movie was about the dangers of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs, but Billingsley will always remember it as the movie that turned him into a lifelong friend of future big-time movie star Vince Vaughn.
Later, Billingsley described the ironic nature of their meeting on this film in an interview with Bullz-Eye. “I was kind of finishing up my acting career, and he was just starting his.” The two remained friends, and this friendship had the unexpected side effect of making Billingsley into a star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He’s secretly a Marvel star
Because Peter Billingsley is a close friend of Matthew Vaughn, he eventually met and befriended Vaughn’s longtime pal and collaborator Jon Favreau. That led to a funny, uncredited cameo in Favreau’s film Elf. And when Favreau became director of the first Iron Man movie, he invited Billingsley to help him kick off the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In that film, you may remember the famous scene where Jeff Bridge’s villainous Obadiah Stane yelled at a scientist, “Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!” The poor scientist he was yelling at was, in fact, Billingsley. Later, this small role got a lot bigger in Spider-Man: Far From Home, where Billingsley reprised the character as one of many disgruntled former Tony Stark employees who have joined forces with the evil Mysterio.
Becoming a Hollywood director and resurrecting Ralphie one last time
Aside from those cameos, Peter Billingsley also had a great performance in the holiday film Four Christmases, a role we think he likely took because he got to act alongside his buddies Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. However, he eventually achieved his dream of becoming a director: he directed Couples Retreat and Term Life, two films that starred (you guessed it) Vincent Vaughn.
For all of his success as a director and producer, however, Billingsley eventually returned to the role that made him famous. In 2022, he starred in the Max original film A Christmas Story Christmas. In this sweet movie, Ralphie is now a beleaguered father with children of his own, and he brings the kids to his hometown so they can experience the magic of the holidays. The movie features great cameos from surviving original actors, and only time will tell if it becomes as much of a holiday staple as the original movie.