Veteran actor finally discovers a role that fits
PASADENA, California — Although Michael O’Neill has been acting for 30 years, he feels he’s really a farmer at heart.
“I think my DNA is a farming DNA, so I believe you till the soil and you get the best seeds you can afford, and you put them in, and you cover it, and you give it the best environment you can. And then you pray for rain ’cause you just don’t know,” he says. “And that’s the part that helped me get through.”
Getting through — not farming but acting — took O’Neill a very long time. Although he’s costarred in Dallas Buyers Club, Grey’s Anatomy, Seabiscuit, The West Wing and scores of other projects, he figures he’s always been a late bloomer.
He grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, the oldest child. “I was never naughty as a kid — I got naughtier as I got older. I got younger as I got older,” he says.
“I was kind of old as a kid. I had to look after my mom a lot.” His mother was often incapacitated. “I had a lot of responsibility. I felt like a loner a lot because you hide. I think for about 30 years I’ve been looking for a role that made me feel like I fit in,” he says.
That role has finally arrived with NBC’s new drama, Council of Dads, which returns Thursday with the pilot at 9 p.m. and Episode 2 at 10. O’Neill plays the AA sponsor to a young man who’s stricken with cancer. Realizing his life is in jeopardy, the young man enlists a group of friends to act as surrogate dads.
“It’s close to my experience,” continues O’Neill. “I’m flawed, but trying to do the right thing. I’m older. I’m a Southerner. I didn’t serve in Vietnam, but that was my war … And I’m an old parent. I had my children late,” he nods.
An address that O’Neill wrote and presented his last year of college found its way to veteran actor Will Geer. Out of the blue Geer phoned him one night.
“And he said: ‘Son, I think you ought to try acting before the corporate structure snaps you up.’ I said: ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ And he said: ‘Come to California and we’ll work with you.’ ”
Armed with $130 his dad had given him, O’Neill packed up his ’71 Volkswagen bug and headed for Los Angeles. He’d loaded all the plants that he’d grown in the back, squeezing past California’s plant-restrictive border by covering them up. “And I got there and I had $60 and I spent $58 on a guitar,” he laughs.
“And I got a job as the garage attendant at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, my first job. Ten at night till 6 in the morning. It was a rough place then. It’s tony now, but it was not then.”
He stayed in L.A. for about four years when he realized he needed training to be an actor. “So I went back to New York and studied with Bill Esper, who trained a lot of good actors,” recalls O’Neill.
It was six years before O’Neill finally copped a paycheque as an actor.
“I waited tables to pay for acting school, worked doubles on the weekends. I got fired from every waiting job I had. I think I might’ve had a little bit of an ‘attitude.’ I wasn’t always gracious about it. The last job I got fired at, I got fired for throwing spoons at the owner.”
Looking back O’Neill ponders, “For every public moment I’ve ever enjoyed, my family’s paid the private price for it. I think I’m a decent dad, I’m a fair husband — she’s still trying to train me; she’s working on it.”