'Kindergarten Cop' Child Star Christian Cousins Dies at 43

Christian Cousins, the child actor who shared the role of Dominic in the 1990 comedy Kindergarten Cop, has died. He was 43.

His half-brother, Jonas Roeser, announced the death on Instagram on October 22, writing, "It's hard to share that my brother, Christian Cousins, has passed away." Cousins had died two days earlier, on October 20, after a battle with liver disease. The news only reached most of the public on Friday, November 13, when entertainment outlets including Parade, TMZ and The Hollywood Reporter picked up Roeser's post — nearly a month after the family first shared it.

"Christian had been very sick with liver disease," Roeser wrote. "It brings me comfort to believe he is now in heaven with his mother, free from the pain he was carrying."

Born Christian Michail Cousins on March 17, 1983, in Orange County, California, he started acting before he was old enough to read a script. He appeared as Bobby Gibson on the CBS soap Knots Landing in 1987, and he and his identical twin brother, Joseph "Joey" Cousins, made an early appearance together in a 1988 episode of Highway to Heaven.

The role that made them recognizable came in 1990. In Kindergarten Cop, Arnold Schwarzenegger played John Kimble, an undercover detective posing as a kindergarten teacher, and the Cousins twins shared the part of Dominic, the young son of the woman Kimble falls for, played by Penelope Ann Miller. The film was a hit, and the twins' faces — two identical boys trading off in the same role — became one of the most familiar sights of early-90s family movies. They went on to appear together in Critters 3 in 1991. Their last credited roles came in 1995, when they were 12.

After that, Christian Cousins stepped away from the cameras. Roeser remembered him in his tribute as a man "full of passion and energy, with big stories and even bigger dreams," a brother whose life after Hollywood stayed mostly out of public view. The family's posts offered no details about what he did in the years after acting, only that he had been seriously ill before his death.

Roeser is the half-brother who carried the news to the public, and Joseph — the twin who stood beside Christian in every one of those early scenes — has not posted publicly about the death. The tribute was a family message first, written for a personal Instagram account alongside a carousel of photos, not a statement issued through a publicist or a studio. That is part of why it took weeks to travel beyond the people who already followed the family.

No official medical cause of death has been released beyond the liver disease Roeser described, and funeral arrangements have not been made public. The family has not said anything more since the October post.

The delayed news of his death is part of the story. The announcement sat on a family Instagram account for three weeks before the wider entertainment press caught it, and by Friday afternoon the tributes were arriving from people who had grown up watching the film. For a generation of viewers, Dominic was the kid in the classroom with the tough detective for a teacher. Christian Cousins was 43 when he died, and the twin who shared his earliest roles is the one left to remember them.