Guide to The Outsiders

The Outsiders Movie (1983): Cast, Who Played Who and How Old They Were

Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio and Matt Dillon before they were famous

By Tori BooksUpdated November 20266 min readMild spoilers

S. E. Hinton

Who played who, and how old they were

How did Francis Ford Coppola come to make The Outsiders?

The idea came from readers. A school librarian in California and her students wrote to Coppola asking him to film the novel, and when he read it, he agreed. He came to Tulsa in 1982, worked on the script with S. E. Hinton and cast a crowd of young unknowns. Shooting ran from late March to mid-May 1982, and Coppola went straight on to film another Hinton novel, Rumble Fish, in the same city.

How old was Ralph Macchio in The Outsiders?

Ralph Macchio was 20 when he played Johnny, a character who is 16. He was older than Matt Dillon, who was 18 and played the hard-bitten Dally, and older than Emilio Estevez, who played Two-Bit, the oldest member of the gang after Darry.

The oldest of the main cast by far was Patrick Swayze, who was 29 while playing 20-year-old Darry. The youngest was C. Thomas Howell, who was 15 and only a year older than Ponyboy. Diane Lane was 17. A small number of these ages can differ by a year in other sources, depending on whether they count from filming in 1982 or from the 1983 release.

Which Outsiders actors became stars?

Almost all of them. Tom Cruise made Risky Business the same year. Ralph Macchio became The Karate Kid in 1984. Patrick Swayze went on to Dirty Dancing and Ghost, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez became central to the Brat Pack films of the mid-1980s, and Diane Lane and Matt Dillon kept working for decades. C. Thomas Howell won a Young Artist Award for his performance as Ponyboy. The film is often called the starting point of that whole generation of young stars.

How is the movie different from the book?

The original cut follows the novel closely but trims a lot, especially at the start and the end, so the Curtis brothers' home life and Ponyboy's slow recovery after the fight get much less time. In 2005 Coppola released The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, which puts back several of those scenes and changes the music.

Small details shift as well. Some roles were cut down to almost nothing, and the gang's personalities are sketched more quickly. But the big moments are all there, including the poem at sunrise and Johnny's last words, which became the theme song: Stay Gold, written by Stevie Wonder with music by Coppola's father, Carmine Coppola.

Was The Outsiders a hit?

Yes. It cost about 10 million dollars and took roughly 33 million at the box office. Critics were divided at the time, but the film found a huge audience among teenagers and has been a classroom favorite ever since, often shown after students finish the book.

It also led directly to the 2024 Broadway musical, which was adapted from both the novel and Coppola's film.

More about The Outsiders

Books Like The Outsiders

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This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.