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Christian Cousins, the former child actor who shared the role of Dominic Palmieri in Kindergarten Cop with his twin brother, Joey, has died at 43.
Cousins’s brother Jonas Roeser announced his death in an Instagram post last month. Roeser said Cousins had been “very sick with liver disease.” The Oct. 22 post did not give a cause of death beyond that information or specify the date he died.
“It’s hard to share that my brother, Christian Cousins, has passed away,” Roeser wrote.
Roeser said that he and the twins were siblings through their biological father, but grew up in different states — Christian and Joseph in California, and Jonas in Washington. He noted that he did not get to know them until he was in college. Before then, he watched their work on television and in the movies.
“Those roles are only a small part of how I’ll remember Christian,” Roeser wrote. “He was a character, full of passion and energy, with big stories and even bigger dreams.”
Cousins and his twin brother played Dominic Palmieri in the 1990 comedy Kindergarten Cop, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a police detective who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher. The brothers shared the role, appearing alongside Schwarzenegger and Penelope Ann Miller.
Years later, during a 30th anniversary reunion, Schwarzenegger noted that the children “made this movie” and that their performances were what made the film so endearing to audiences.
Penelope Ann Miller, left, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, right, in Kindergarten Cop. (Universal Pictures)
Beyond his cinematic turn in Kindergarten Cop, Cousins was a familiar face on television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He and Joseph appeared in nearly 60 episodes of the prime-time soap opera Knots Landing, portraying Bobby Gibson Ewing between 1987 and 1992. The twins also appeared in several other projects, including Critters 3 (1991), Intruders (1992) and Twin Sitters (1994), before retiring from acting in 1995.
In his tribute, Roeser expressed a sense of peace knowing that his brother is no longer suffering.
“It brings me comfort to believe he is now in heaven with his mother, free from the pain he was carrying,” he wrote. “Rest easy, Christian. I hope your soul is at rest and that you’ve found peace.”
