The cause of death for Peter Greene, a character actor known for playing villains in movies including \u201cPulp Fiction\u201d and \u201cThe Mask,\u201d has been revealed by New York City\u2019s Office of Chief Medical Examiner.<\/p>\n
Police found Greene, 60, dead in his apartment Dec. 12. They didn\u2019t suspect foul play.<\/p>\n
His death was ruled an accident, the M.E.\u2019s office said via email. Greene died from a \u201cgunshot wound of left axilla with injury of brachial artery,\u201d the office said. In everyday English, that means he shot himself in his left underarm and injured a significant artery that starts in the shoulder and runs down to the elbow crease.<\/p>\n
Police found the character actor in his Lower East Side apartment, Deadline<\/a> reported, after neighbors heard Christmas music playing for days and one of them called authorities and the landlord for a wellness check. <\/p>\n Greene had a history of addiction, per the New York Post<\/a>, and attempted suicide in the 1990s. He was scheduled to go in for a procedure to remove a benign tumor near his lung on the day he was found, the outlet said. His manager had talked to him two days before he was found. <\/p>\n \u201cHe sounded OK \u2026 It was just a totally normal conversation. He was a little nervous about the operation going in, but he said it wasn\u2019t super serious,\u201d manager Gregg Edwards told the Post in December. \u201cHe was talking about that and hoping that I was going to be OK and wishing me well as I was wishing him well. We\u2019re good friends. I love the guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Greene\u2019s best-known role was the villain Zed, who was brought in to torture Bruce Willis and Ving Rhames\u2019 characters in Quentin Tarantino\u2019s 1994 classic \u201cPulp Fiction.\u201d In \u201cThe Mask,\u201d<\/a> also released in 1994, he played mobster Dorian Tyrell, antagonist to Jim Carrey\u2019s Stanley Ipkiss, a.k.a. the Mask.<\/p>\n Those roles came only a couple of years into Greene\u2019s career, which per IMDb included nearly 100 TV and film credits from 1990 to 2026. His TV credits included episodes of \u201cChicago P.D.,\u201d \u201cHawaii Five-0,\u201d \u201cLaw & Order,\u201d \u201cJustified\u201d and more.<\/p>\n He started out with parts in a couple of TV shows in the early 1990s before landing the lead role in \u201cLaws of Gravity.\u201d In 1995, Times movie critic Kenneth Turan called the 1992 film \u201cindependent American filmmaking at its best\u201d and described Jimmy (Greene)<\/a> as \u201ca small-time street outlaw who, though horrified at the thought of actual work, is stable by local standards\u201d in Brooklyn\u2019s then crime-ridden Greenpoint neighborhood. <\/p>\n