In movies and television shows including Die Hard and Top Gun, actor and academic Clarence Gilyard Jr. made appearances. An announcement about his passing was made on Monday by UNLV, where he served as an associate professor in the college of fine arts.

Over the course of a 30-year career, Gilyard appeared in roles on the stage, on television, and in movies. In the 1986 version of Top Gun, he played the part of Sundown. Later, in the 1989 movie Die Hard, he made an unforgettable impression as the sinister computer genius Theo.

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Gilyard allegedly passed away after a “long illness,” though the specifics of his passing are yet unknown.

Gilyard, who was born in Moses Lake, Washington, in 1955, had his film debut in “Top Gun” (1986), playing Marcus “Sundown” Williams, an exceptional jet pilot.
In “Die Hard,” opposite Bruce Willis as detective John McClane, the actor would go on to play Theo, Hans Gruber’s eccentric computer hacker who takes control of the Nakatomi Plaza’s security codes (1988).

When Gilyard co-starred with Willis in a 2020 Advance Auto Parts commercial promoting the company’s DieHard vehicle batteries, he played Theo once more. Theo led McClane on an action-packed expedition to find a new battery for his dead automobile in the two-minute commercial.