Bear McCreary

An Emmy-winning American composer with an inventive streak across multiple formats, Bear McCreary first gained widespread recognition through his scores for Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, The Walking Dead, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Foundation. His feature-film work encompasses Colossal, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Child's Play, while his video-game credits run from Assassin's Creed Syndicate and God of War to God of War Ragnarök. In 2024 he issued his first solo project, the expansive rock concept album The Singularity.

Born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on February 17, 1979, to writer Laura Kalpakian, McCreary earned degrees in composition and recording arts at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern California. He later served as protégé to film composer Elmer Bernstein, reconstructing and re-orchestrating the 1963 motion-picture score for Kings of the Sun and producing a fresh recording of that music.

After composing for numerous short films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, McCreary received his first major assignment when he was chosen to score the Sci Fi Channel’s 2004 revival of Battlestar Galactica. La-La Land Records issued soundtrack albums drawn from each of the show’s four seasons in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009. Concurrently he scored the PlanR straight-to-video release Rest Stop and its sequel Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back, along with the straight-to-video feature Wrong Turn 2: Dead End; the latter two scores also appeared on La-La Land, which additionally released his music for the 2008 Fox series Eureka and the Sci Fi Channel series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. His pilot score for the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica surfaced in 2009, after which he remained with the one-season series.

That same year McCreary began scoring AMC’s zombie drama The Walking Dead, which debuted in October 2010. Subsequent assignments included NBC’s superhero series The Cape in 2011, the historical fantasy Da Vinci’s Demons in 2013, and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., also launched in 2013. Relativity Records released the first of his Billboard-charting Outlander soundtracks in 2015. The following year brought horror scores for The Forest, The Boy, and 10 Cloverfield Lane. In 2017 he delivered music for the sci-fi black comedy Colossal, the slasher thriller Happy Death Day, and the J.D. Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye. Outlander: Series 3 appeared in 2018. The next year he scored Rim of the World, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Child’s Play while continuing with Outlander’s fourth season. He next supplied the score for Blumhouse Productions’ 2020 Fantasy Island, a cinematic reimagining of the 1970s and 1980s television series. In 2021 McCreary composed for Apple’s television adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. 2024 saw the release of The Singularity, a graphic novel and sci-fi rock concept album featuring guest appearances by Slash, Serj Tankian, Corey Taylor, and Rufus Wainwright, among others.