Photo by Ted Sun
BEAR McCREARY
Three-time GRAMMY® Award-nominated, Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning composer Bear McCreary began his career as a protégé of legendary film composer Elmer Bernstein, before bursting onto the scene scoring the influential and revered series Battlestar Galactica in 2004. Since then, McCreary has been a four-time Emmy Award nominee and Emmy winner for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme for Da Vinci’s Demons, a musical palindrome that sounds the same forwards and backwards, and has won multiple International Film Music Critics Association Awards. He has been named the 23rd Most Definitive Bear in Popular Culture by the Ringer and has also been the subject of a clue on Jeopardy! Recent projects include the Amazon Original hit series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; Foundation for Apple TV+; the beloved Starz series Outlander; Netflix’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Crip Camp (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama); Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla: King of the Monsters; Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Films’ 10 Cloverfield Lane; AMC’s global phenomenon The Walking Dead; Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; and the video game Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge for Disney. McCreary’s acclaimed scores to Sony PlayStation’s blockbusters God of War and God of War Ragnarök have earned him honors including a GRAMMY® Award nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and awards from the Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the Hollywood Music in Media Awards, the International Film Music Critics Association, the ASCAP Composers Choice Awards, and the BAFTA Games Awards.
In 2024, McCreary released The Singularity, an epic hard-rock concept album and accompanying graphic novel. The album, which he first began writing as a teenager, features a legendary lineup of rock talent, including Slash, Serj Tankian (System of a Down), Corey Taylor (Slipknot), Rufus Wainwright, and many more. The Singularity was co-written and co-produced by McCreary’s brother, Brendan McCreary, who is also the album’s primary vocalist. The accompanying story is revealed on the album in three spoken-word monologues lifted directly from the graphic novel, performed by celebrated actors Lee Pace (Foundation, The Hobbit), Danai Gurira (Black Panther, The Walking Dead), and Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy, God of War Ragnarök).
McCreary has long enjoyed collaborating with artists from across the musical spectrum, including Hozier, Fiona Apple, Shirley Manson (Garbage), and the late Sinéad O’Connor. He has composed concert commissions for the Calder Quartet and Getty Center, the Hagen Philharmonic and Ballet in Germany, the Television Academy, the Seattle Symphony, and the Golden State Pops Orchestra. In July 2014, Maestro Gustavo Dudamel conducted a suite of McCreary’s music with the L.A. Philharmonic and L.A. Master Chorale at the Hollywood Bowl.