Lou Diamond Phillips Shares AWESOME Stories From the Set of 'Young Guns'

Lou Diamond Phillips made his first in-person visit to The Rich Eisen Show, and he arrived with a new movie, four decades of stories, and no apparent interest in slowing down. His film "Gangland" is out now in limited theaters and on all digital platforms, and Phillips plays the kind of role he has grown into rather than reached for.

"I'm a tribal police officer," Phillips told Rich, describing a story that starts with the arrival of a young female officer, played by Donna Nemrod, "on the eve of what could be a gang war on the reservation." He reached for the obvious comparisons himself, pointing to Denzel Washington's "Training Day" and to "Colors" with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. The old bull taking the young one under his wing, except here the younger cop is a woman.

Phillips said the appeal was the mileage. "People say, how did you prepare? I said, well, I lived." He has played, by his own count, more cops than he can track, and he has been adopted into the Lakota and Cheyenne nations through his work on "Longmire." He also used the film to lift up a group of young Indigenous actors, many of whom were background artists in "Killers of the Flower Moon" and are delivering dialogue on screen for the first time. "They absolutely kill it," he said.

Then the conversation turned to the thing that still follows him through every airport. Forty years after "La Bamba," strangers still yell "Ritchie" and try to sing to him, "mostly people who don't know the words," he laughed. The film that made him turns 40 next year. It was shot in 1986 and released in 1987, a small movie made for $6 million that carried none of the markings of a hit. Phillips remembered running out of money that December, down to about $3,000 even with three roommates, before an episode of "Miami Vice" opposite Viggo Mortensen and Annette Bening kept him afloat.

His first three Hollywood films came in a rush: "La Bamba," "Stand and Deliver," and "Young Guns," in that order. Edward James Olmos, who knew Phillips had played Ritchie Valens, handed him a phone number and told him to call it when he got to Los Angeles. That became "Stand and Deliver." But it was walking onto the "Young Guns" set in early 1988, alongside Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Kiefer Sutherland, where Phillips said he thought, "I've arrived." He called himself "the brown Brat Packer," then corrected it to "Brat Pack adjacent."

The set stories held up. Estevez, "a huge prankster," planted cow pies in the cast's welcome boxes from the studio. Phillips and Sutherland answered by renting a sheep for $100, dressing it in a corset and a garter belt, and leaving it in Estevez's trailer. By the time filming wrapped for the day, the sheep had eaten the couch. His first meeting with Jack Palance was even better. After two minutes of Phillips gushing about the honor of working with a legend, Palance looked at him, said "Yes," and walked away.

The payoff is a reunion. All six original "Young Guns" cast members, including Dermot Mulroney and Casey Siemaszko, are set to appear together for the first time in nearly 40 years at a Dallas fan expo in September. Phillips added that Estevez has written a "Young Guns 3" script and is talking to the studio. Hollywood, he argued, keeps underestimating the fan base. "What's old is new again," he said, "in so many ways."