Bear McCreary

An innovative and Emmy Award-winning American composer who has found success in a wide array of mediums, Bear McCreary is best known for his work on the television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, The Walking Dead, and Foundation. His film scores include Colossal, Godzilla: King of Monsters, and Child's Play, and he has provided the music for dozens of video games such as Assassin's Creed Syndicate, God of War, and God of War Ragnarök. In 2024, he released his debut solo effort, an ambitious rock concept album titled The Singularity.

Bear McCreary was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on February 17, 1979, the son of writer Laura Kalpakian. He obtained degrees in composition and recording arts from the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California and became a protégé of film composer Elmer Bernstein, for whom he reconstructed and re-orchestrated the score for the 1963 film Kings of the Sun, resulting in a new recording of the music.

After scoring a number of short films in the late '90s and early 2000s, McCreary was hired to compose the music for a new version of the television series Battlestar Galactica, which premiered on the Sci Fi Channel in 2004. Soundtrack albums of his music were released in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009 by La-La Land Records, corresponding to the four seasons of the series. During that time, he also scored the straight-to-video film Rest Stop (released by PlanR) and its sequel, Rest Stop: Don't Look Back, as well as another straight-to-video feature, Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. The latter two scores were released by the La-La Land label, which also issued his music for the Fox TV series Eureka and the Sci Fi Channel's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, both in 2008. His score for the pilot episode of the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica was released in 2009, and he stayed on to write for the series' full one-season run.

That same year, he was tapped to score AMC's popular zombie drama series The Walking Dead, which premiered in October 2010. Over the next few years, McCreary's talents became increasingly in demand as he took jobs scoring NBC's superhero drama The Cape (2011), the historical fantasy series Da Vinci's Demons (2013), and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013), just to name a few. In 2015, the first of his Billboard-charting soundtracks to the STARZ time-travel series Outlander was released by Relativity Records. The following year brought a string of film scores in the horror realm that included The Forest, The Boy, and 10 Cloverfield Lane. More genre-related scores followed in 2017, including soundtracks for the sci-fi black comedy Colossal and the slasher thriller Happy Death Day, as well as the J.D. Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye. McCreary's score for Outlander: Series 3 appeared in 2018. The next year, he lent his talents to Rim of the World, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Child's Play, while continuing his work on Outlander's fourth season. He also supplied the music for Blumhouse Production's 2020 film Fantasy Island, a retooling of the cult '70s and '80s TV show. The following year, McCreary composed the music for Apple's ambitious TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation book series. 2024 saw the release of The Singularity, a graphic novel and sci-fi rock concept album that featured collaborations with Slash, Serj Tankian, Corey Taylor, and Rufus Wainwright, among others. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi