Omri Katz Played Max in Hocus Pocus, Then Walked Away from Acting to Follow the Grateful Dead for 5 Years

Omri Katz walked away from Hollywood at 26, after nearly two decades on camera, and by the time he tried to come back the passion was gone.

Omri Katz makes an appearance at 90s Con at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford on March 18, 2023. Photo by Emily Assiran / Getty Images.

He first shot to fame at 7 as John Ross Ewing III on Dallas in 1983, playing J.R. and Sue Ellen’s son for roughly 133 episodes across eight years. At 15 he led the cult NBC series Eerie, Indiana, which ran one season from 1991 to 1993. In 1993 he also played Stan in Joe Dante’s Matinee opposite John Goodman, a critical hit that flopped at the box office.

Still from Hocus Pocus.

That same year, at 17, he landed Max Dennison in Kenny Ortega’s Hocus Pocus, the role a young Leonardo DiCaprio had also been in the running for.

He’s since admitted he was high for parts of the shoot. “Let’s just say, some of those scenes, I was having a good old time,” he told Entertainment Weekly, recalling “misperforming and not hitting my keys or marks” until Ortega finally asked if he was stoned. “I was like, ‘No,’ and of course, I was.”

He left not long after. “I grew up in the industry, so that’s kind of all I knew,” he told former Eerie co-star Justin Shenkarow on the Bronx Buds YouTube channel. “I think I was soul searching and wanted more of a human experience; just see what else is out there, see the world, and be normal. I didn’t really have that growing up.”

The source calls what came next being a “band groupie.” He followed the Grateful Dead on tour for about five years, spent five seasons in Jackson Hole as a snowboarder, waited tables, and worked eight years as a hairdresser at a high-end Los Angeles salon.

Outside AMC Lincoln Square Theater in New York City, fans dressed in costume gathered for the September 2022 premiere of Disney’s “Hocus Pocus 2.” Photo by Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images.

When he did try to come back, it fell apart. “I did a few stints and like, you know, episodals. I did like Freaks and Geeks, General Hospital,” he said on the Est. In The 90s podcast in September 2025. He kept flubbing lines and freezing up. “I had some weird like psychological block that I couldn’t do it.”

“I wanted to get back into acting for all the wrong reasons… to make money so I could escape again, and that didn’t work out too well,” he said. “I had to get a real job, the first one in my life.”

His last credit was a 2002 short film. In 2020 he briefly reprised Max for a Bette Midler fundraising video, and later that year launched a craft cannabis brand, The Mary Danksters, with the slogan “positivity, herb and unity.” He publicly supported Hocus Pocus 2 in 2022 but wasn’t in it.

Omri Katz photographed at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Universal City, CA during the NBC Summer TCA Press Tour in July 1991. Photo by Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images.

He’s 50 now, lives in the Los Angeles area, works the 90s and horror convention circuit, and takes Cameo bookings; so you know, you could go order a video from him from your friend that is still obsessed with Hocus Pocus.

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