“The Pitt” star Katherine LaNasa plays a rather rational charge nurse who manages lifesaving shifts at a beleaguered medical trauma center on the popular HBO show. LaNasa herself, meanwhile, told W Magazine that she believes in ghosts — and has seen one multiple times.
The ghost in question? That of her ex-husband, late Hollywood screen icon Dennis Hopper.
“I do believe in ghosts,” LaNasa confirmed in an interview released Tuesday. “The ghost of Dennis Hopper would not leave me alone for a really long time. We had been divorced a very long time, but I was the last wife that he’d been with that he wasn’t currently divorcing.”
She said, “He visited me first in ways that were scary. He came one time where he was at the Academy Awards and he was in a wheelchair and he fell down and it was super upsetting. He used to come over to me in, like, a sweat, and I told him he had to leave me alone.”
The Emmy winner was married to Hopper from 1989 to 1992. Hopper, who was not only a screen legend of New Hollywood but wrote the seminal 1969 counterculture classic “Easy Rider,” died in 2010 from complications of metastasized prostate cancer. He was 74.
LaNasa said his specter obliged when she ordered it to leave, only for her to feel “really weird about it” and tell her friend. She recalled walking home a different route that day and spontaneously entering an art gallery — only to find it riddled with Hopper’s photos.
Hopper was a very accomplished photographer in his spare time.
Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images
“And [there was one] photograph of him in the very back of the gallery with a fedora on, winking at the camera,” LaNasa told W Magazine. “So I felt like he was letting me go.”
She continued, “And then he came to me shortly after that in a dream. We were both in a cafeteria in Greece and he told me that he was OK and that he wasn’t in pain anymore and he was good. And I never heard from him again.”
Centuries of research have yielded no credible scientific evidence of ghosts, but there’s no shortage of purported sightings, including by famous celebrities. “Uncut Gems” star Julia Fox said her Harlem home is haunted, while Will Smith allegedly encountered a ghost in London.
It remains unclear when LaNasa had her apparent sightings of Hopper’s specter, but she tied the knot two years after his death with fellow actor Grant Show. The couple first met in 2006 while filming the HBO show “Big Love” and share a 12-year-old daughter named Eloise.